
Ask HN: Will we ever have affordable and attractive urban housing for all? - drcross
It seems every area of our lives has been improved through technology except for the cost of housing. Food and produce has reduced in price to the point where the average minimum wage provides a decent standard of living but the prospect of house ownership is a 25 to 30 year loan repayment (if you are able to get a loan). I know world populations are increasing causing scarcity and that we are also improving our transportation technology but human accommodation needs have not changed and we still seem unable to &quot;hack&quot; urban housing at scale.
Do you see any changes coming down the line that will improve this situation?
======
w1ntermute
The reason housing is expensive regardless of technological advances is
because it's a people problem, not a technological problem. The people who
would benefit the most from cheaper urban housing are not in a position to
vote for the policies that would cause that to happen, as the vast majority of
them don't live in those cities.

The only way to solve this problem is to wrest control of local policy
decisions away from municipal governments and make them instead at the state
or national level. Unfortunately, I don't see that happening any time soon,
since those already living in cities are much more incentivized to fight to
retain the status quo than those who don't live there are incentivized to
fight for changes that could hypothetically help them.

~~~
pessimizer
The reason housing is so expensive is because it is a financial vehicle, and
has little to do with housing density. It's a fantasy that building more will
bring prices down.

Housing prices were remarkably consistent with all other prices for the 100
years before around 1998.

~~~
bgitarts
This argument doesn't past the smell test as it doesn't explain why home
prices are less today in Detroit than 10 years ago and why home prices fell
around the country in 2008.

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massysett
Technology has improved the cost of housing.

In the USA, the average house size has grown. So has its quality. It has air
conditioning standard in warm climates. It has safer electrical systems that
handle higher loads. It has more carpeting. More bathrooms. Better appliances,
with washers and dryers standard. More, bigger windows. Higher ceilings in
basements. Lower-maintenance building envelopes. Better fire safety, with fire
sprinklers being required in many jurisdictions. Off-street parking. The list
goes on and on.

Technology helps explain why housing has improved so much. Much of the home is
fabricated offsite and trucked in. Computers help make more efficient use of
materials. Manufactured building products (like oriented strand board) make
more efficient use of lumber, and create more durable products. The labor
savings are immense: compare the labor to sweat a house of copper pipes versus
using pex. Compare plastering a house versus drywall. Not even in the same
league cost wise.

Do not make the mistake of looking at a few extraordinarily high cost areas
like SF or NYC and believe they represent anything typical. They do not.
Housing has improved dramatically in just a few decades.

~~~
eecks
What's relevant is the cost of housing where people want to live.

~~~
spoonie
Yes, but that's too subjective to measure. A better proxy may be housing cost
relative to wages.

------
Bjorkbat
With regards to the US, there is affordable and attractive urban housing, just
not in cities that people particularly want to live in.

I mean, look at the Midwest. Houses there cost nothing compared to houses in
metro areas along the coast. It's not like cities there are terribly middling
either. You look at the Cleveland Metro, and it has 3.2 million people, it has
a lot of historical architecture, it has good infrastructure, it's alright
overall.

But everyone wants to live in LA, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, Denver,
New York, Miami, or pretty much any other major city along our nation's
western or eastern coasts (not so much the southern coast, unless you like
living in a greenhouse in the summer).

I mean, I get it, all the cool stuff is happening elsewhere, but Midwesterners
are still having a good time, sans beach.

In case you're wondering, I myself live in New Mexico in a place called
Albuquerque. Affordable, but not as affordable as some Midwestern cities.
Because the city wasn't in the Rust Belt there's also fewer older structures.
The boom took place once all the nuclear scientists moved in and gas was
cheap, so it's pretty badly sprawled out.

~~~
shostack
You're omitting a major factor in this. Jobs.

I moved from Chicago to the Bay Area and while I'm not a developer, the
opportunities are still night and day in terms of the job options, the pay,
benefits, etc.

A cheap mortgage on a nice house in a good neighborhood means squat if there
are not a lot of job options, or only ones a long commute away.

Personally I think the best thing to help this is make remote work more viable
for non developer professions that don't have as much demand or leverage. This
would enable more people to live in affordable areas if getting another remote
job were comparable to living in a market flush with jobs.

~~~
Bjorkbat
That is true, I am conveniently omitting the jobs part.

So maybe the right answer to ask is not how to create more affordable and
attractive housing, but rather how to spread the jobs out to cities overlooked
by employers.

Why isn't there a satellite Google office in Cincinnati, in other words?

~~~
zaccus
Why does Google need physical offices in the first place?

------
bobochan
Why does it have to be urban? As a rural resident I do not understand the
attraction. I can walk or bike everywhere that I want to go. Thousands of
miles of trails branch out in every direction depending on my heart's content.
Farms within easy distance produce a bounty to enjoy, including world class
beer. I am not sure why the growing trend toward global mega-cities is in our
best interest.

~~~
BjoernKW
Everyone's different. I certainly like nature but I can't imagine living in
the countryside. Just to give you my perspective why I think city life is
fantastic:

First thing that comes to mind: I like (mostly non-mainstream) music and I
like to go to live music events. There's no way I can do that frequently in a
rural area. Well, apart from driving to the next larger city, that is.

Which brings me to the next point: While public transport in larger cities
often is far from perfect it's ok to pretty decent most of the time. Living in
a rural area requires owning a car, something which I've given up on years ago
and never intend to do again.

Then there's the economic aspect of cities: Where there's a greater density of
people and companies there also is more potential income available. Cities
allow you to make new connections on a regular basis. Meeting new people
allows you to explore new opportunities - economic or otherwise - if only by
serendipity.

Apart from that, large cities counterintuitively also make sense ecologically
because they require less resources than if the some number of human beings
lived spread out through the country.

~~~
bobochan
All good points.

I personally consider every time I get in the car to be a failure on my part
that I regret. It takes some planning, but I get around mostly by walking,
biking, and taking advantage of our regional bus system (which admittedly does
not come very often). Other friends of mine commute by cross country skiing or
by rowing when the weather makes it conducive.

There is a lot of great music in rural areas, especially live music. It helps
if you develop an appreciation for fiddle music and sad songs about logging
camps, the love that you lost, and really good dogs. Admittedly these may be
acquired tastes.

Having close contacts in urban areas certainly helps on the income front, and
I will admit is that a minimum of a three hour drive to the nearest major
airport makes jetting off to speak or consult challenging.

I am definitely going to look into the ecological balance, because I that is
something I cannot speak to. A lot of my neighbors have solar panels and are
off the grid, but you could be right about that.

------
edblarney
Understand a few things first:

A) The 'cost of housing' is usually not the building itself. It's the land.
So, we can't compare to other products.

B) It's greatly affected by financing, interest rates, accepted norms. Ex:
when interest rates drop, housing prices balloon. Also - as people accept
longer and longer mortgages, housing prices ballon.

C) It's a relative thing, not a 'cost' thing. There are x number of people and
say, roughly x spots for housing. The riches people will live where they want.
The others go elsewhere. If rich people want to live in an urban area, there
is nary a solution for 'low cost' housing in that area.

Some things like 'rent control' \- if applied responsibly can maybe help, but
they can also create other weird problems.

Social housing might help, but also, some other odd problems.

The only want to allow poor people to live in expensive areas is to seriously
mess with market forces, and that can be problematic.

The 'problem' we are trying to address here is age old: 'the fair and
equitable distribution of resources'. It's not going to be solved with some
new technology or process :), it will probably be some smart economic
thinking.

------
bgitarts
It's a supply and demand issue at the core. There is simply more demand for
housing units than available and so prices continue to rise until demand
tapers off.

Using New York City as an example there are about 3.4 million residential
housing units available and a population that is set to reach 9 million in the
next few years (500k increase).

It's true that there is not much raw land left for new development, but the
city can change zoning in areas. Imagine if 100,000 1 family houses are
rezoned to allow for even just 8 unit multi-family walkup. 800,000 new housing
units would help counter the demand that causes the price to keep rising.

The home construction industry also has issues which end raising the finished
cost of housing. An interesting read is "Sweat Equity" by Larry Angell, A
self-published book where the author describes why it made financial sense for
him to leave his job for a year to build his own house rather than buy a house
and continue working.

~~~
JBlue42
Zoning is also a big issue in LA and hasn't been updated since the 70s I
believe.

If you look at a satellite view of the city, there are nodes of density with
massive amounts of individual house spaces. But it's expensive all over. I
don't think there's any real solution to that outside of another real estate
collapse here (which only set things back for a few years and stopped some
gentrification creep).

------
hanoz
Technologists giveth, rentiers taketh away.

"Will we ever have affordable and attractive urban housing for all?". No, not
as thing stand. Those with a monopoly on credit will continue to use
competition for accommodation as a means to leach every spare drop of wealth
from the productive members of society.

------
cagenut
Its a really fascinating problem and if I ever won the powerball I'd take a
crack at it. It touches _everything_ , from the fundamental differences
between capitalism and communism to the raw math of just how much steel and
concrete (or w/e) it would take to give everyone ~30+m^2. Which, when the
nominator is all sorted out, inevitably leads to the question of what to do
with the denominator.

Realistically we either need a massive borderline miraculous leap forward in
materials science and construction technology (like carbon nanofiber weaving
spider drones) or a completely different system from capitalism for allocating
for basic needs, or a looooot less people. Its not really a space problem at
all so much as a energy cost and societal values one.

~~~
edblarney
It has zero to do with steel, concrete or anything material.

The cost of making the building is not the issues.

It's the property price that is the issue, always.

~~~
spoonie

        It's the property price that is the issue
    

And a Land Value Tax instead of traditional property tax would go a long way
to solving this problem. (Basically, tax the value of the raw land, not the
man-made property on top.)

It would prevent speculative ownership of land and encourage development of
underused land in high-value areas. It would also capture a lot of the value
of urban development, so that the urban area gets the money rather than
private owners who simply got lucky enough to buy the property.

------
DasIch
Housing is partly a status symbol and those that can afford it often put
measures in place to make sure that those they don't want to have living next
to them can't afford to. Housing that is affordable for all, will by
definition not be attractive for all. You imply the existence of a goal that
doesn't actually exist and for which there is no consensus.

Even if that were a goal, you couldn't reach it because there is only so much
space. This would be a problem even, if we were to use what space is
available, which is usually not the case for political reasons.

Improved technology won't help you and even changing politics wouldn't get you
to this.

------
dragonwriter
No we won't ever have affordable and _attractive_ urban housing for all,
because standards of attractiveness will naturally adjust to be somewhat
beyond whatever is affordable and accessible to all.

------
dmritard96
I am very aware of the benefits to urban living, but i do wonder if humans are
inherently happier living in high density environments. I feel like the
benefits of urban living are less crucial if the human population was
prevented from growing or even reduced with time.

~~~
reustle
I've spent a considerable amount of time living in Tokyo and New York City. In
NY, most weekends I would take the bus to my tiny hometown in Pennsylvania
where I was surrounded by nature. I find that the things I get mentally from
the city is extreme amounts of social interaction, and from the countryside I
get the deep connection with nature. I think it is near impossible to find the
social interaction I'm looking for in small towns, as I want a high
concentration of smart, open minded people.

~~~
sjg007
Woah woah.. it's not very open minded of you to say that small town folks are
dumb and closed minded!

~~~
true_religion
It's true, dumb is the opposite of smart, but nothing there implies that small
town folk are dumb.

Small town folk are of average intelligence, with a lower concentration of
significantly smarter people simply due to the fact that high paying jobs are
concentrated in urban areas.

If you were to concentrate high paying jobs in small towns, you'd see the
reverse happening.

As for being closed minded---I'd find that people from urban areas are more
close minded if they happen to live in their enclave without much interaction
outside of it. Many people in cities are highly mobile, but many people in
cities just treat their neighborhood as a walled garden, and are highly
defensive against other types of people.

~~~
matheweis
That still makes the assumption that the smartest people must necessarily be
taking on the highest paying jobs. That may or may not be true.

~~~
ZeroFries
No, it assumes smarter people take higher paying jobs on average, which is
most likely true.

[https://pumpkinperson.com/2016/02/11/the-incredible-
correlat...](https://pumpkinperson.com/2016/02/11/the-incredible-correlation-
between-iq-income/)

------
facepalm
Is it technology holding housing back, or politics? I thought it was mostly
the latter?

~~~
Inconel
I too believe it's mostly political. If some hypothetical SV startup invented
a shoebox sized device that cost $100 and when sprinkled with water would
unfold into a multi unit residence, we would still be faced with a ton of
other issues relating to zoning, particularly density and parking
requirements, that would continue to make housing prohibitive.

Also, Americans have been sold on the idea of real estate as an investment and
I'm not sure how we will ever get policies that lead to lower housing prices
when that essentially means that a large part of the population will have to
agree to enact policies that will result in depreciation of their primary
asset.

~~~
bbcbasic
Otoh a device to shrink humans to fit in a shoebox would be disruptive.

------
MrFantastic
The problem is lots of people want to live in the same areas.

------
ddw
The answer is to rework city zoning laws to allow for more vertical building
and less car parking requirements, but $$$, nimbyism and "I was here first"
thinking gets in the way. Way more people want to live in cities than can
afford it and it's a shame that cities aren't thinking about this enough.

It's a people problem, not a technology one - the elevator was already
invented.

"The Rent Is Too Damn High" is a good, short book on this.

------
ryao
Capsule hotels could work nicely for single people if an entrepreneur brought
the concept to the US:

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capsule_hotel](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capsule_hotel)

By the way, someone really ought to define what they mean when they discuss
affordable things. It seems everyone has a different idea of what that means.

------
Spooky23
Yes. The internet allows you to avoid high cost areas.

I pay about 25% of the cost of a 1 bedroom apartment in SFO for a 4 bedroom
house with a great yards, with a 15 year mortgage.

Any gap in salary for not living in SFO/NYC/BOS is more than accounted for. In
my case, over my lifetime I'll come out $4M ahead.

~~~
nether
What's the catch?

~~~
Spooky23
You either need to find a job locally, which is a bit of a hustle, or travel.

You won't be working for a hit new startup.

------
leojg
I believe that we eventually will have a reliable and cheap way of making
durable houses, maybe 3D printing. There are machines capable of doing so now,
its just a matter of refining and provide them with enough availability

The main issues I see are:

Construction is a low skill labor intensive source of jobs, so unions and
government don't want to cut it. And a more efficient way of building will
probably mean less people working.

Most people loves being showing off, a huge house is the best way of showing
how much money and power you have. Why print this wall when you could buy some
expensive material?

------
wiseleo
Clustering low income residents creates the "street prison" phenomenon. Such
housing complexes often have bars on windows for residents' protection. They
may have increased frequency police patrols. In effect, people voluntarily
incarcerate themselves.

We need to solve that problem first. Sadly, I don't have a solution.

------
superuser2
The prevailing winds in the regulatory climate do not seem to point towards a
skyscraper construction boom anytime soon.

Over in technology, we're rapidly marching towards cheap household-scale solar
panels and batteries, commodity autonomous driving technology, and cheap
electric cars. Elon Musk's satellite constellation will deliver decent
internet service regardless of the population density/economics needed to
support fibre buildout. Telepresence is already good and keeps getting better.

The society coming down the line is one made of energy-independent prefab
houses with no particular constraints on location (so they'll go to where land
is cheapest), drastically improved freeway throughput (autonomous cars can
pack much more densely), and car interiors not much different from small
apartments (you'll be able to eat, sleep, and work while the computer drives).

So, as it gets easier to live farther from work, the economic incentives for
everyone to cluster into a few square miles will diminish greatly.

------
ljsocal
When (not if!) ride-sharing in electric cars becomes much bigger, it will free
up a huge amount of real estate from car-related use to other uses. (Fun fact:
In the U.S., there are four parking spots for every one of the 255 million
cars.) Add to that, all of the gas stations, oil change outfits, car washes,
auto parts stores, auto dealerships, etc., etc. Every home that elects to go
car-less will now have whatever garage, carport, driveway space available for
an extra bedroom, garden, etc.

The other urban trend of smaller housing unit zoning will allow increased
density which will also bring the cost of housing down. The demand is there a
NY Times article reported that when new micro apartments (260 to 360 square
feet) were available, 60,000 people applied for one of the the 55 units.
Article: [http://tinyurl.com/ntdjvt9](http://tinyurl.com/ntdjvt9)

------
ksec
I would imagine, in 15 - 20 years time, when self driving Car is a thing, the
need for Urban Housing will drop. You car can be summoned whenever you need
and not worried about where to park it as it will find and park itself.

------
jvickers
No. I hope not. Not everyone wants it anyway.

~~~
epistasis
Why would you not want some people to get what they want? If they were happy
would their happiness make you unhappy?

------
nunez
As long as demand outstrips supply, I can't foresee that happening.

~~~
gozur88
Demand will always outstrip supply in trendy areas.

------
joeclark77
I think that "affordable", "attractive", and "urban" form kind of an Iron
Triangle in the sense that you can have any two out of three.

