
Social Housing in the United States [pdf] - rbranson
https://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/SocialHousing.pdf
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Eridrus
I'm sympathetic to all of these ideas, and I think we should really be talking
more about housing on a national level, but there are a few main issues I see
that all of the public funding proposals ignore:

a) Housing is, at the limit, a positional good.

b) Construction costs are crazy, e.g.
[https://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/news/2018/04/26/con...](https://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/news/2018/04/26/construction-
costs-killing-new-bay-area-housing.html) and not just in the bay area, I spent
a bunch of time looking this up with a focus on NYC and they were in the 400k+
price per unit range there.

c) Construction costs go up as density increases, particularly once you need
to install an elevator.

d) NIMBYs/zoning/permitting costs.

As I see it, the insane costs associated with building new housing is why
we're only getting "luxury" apartments - you just can't make any money because
of the high costs.

So where does that leave us? IMO it means we need better transit, but at least
for the NYC subway construction costs are insane, and we need a way to build
things more cheaply.

I have my own pet idea in modular housing being promising for bringing down
construction costs, but fundamentally it is an operational, not policy
problem.

And I don't think anyone really has a solution for NIMBYism besides overriding
them at a state level, which has not been very effective so far.

~~~
rbranson
Land and not housing is a positional good, but socializing it can help reduce
the effects.

Density only actually needs to be very high for a very, very tiny fraction of
land. In SF, for instance, something like 80% of the land is zoned exclusively
for single-family homes. You don't need elevators nor steel-frame construction
to build 3-4 units where there previously was 1. A very substantial amount of
inexpensive housing can be built where zoning currently disallows it. As you
said though, transit becomes the next bottleneck.

~~~
Eridrus
> Land and not housing is a positional good

Yes, but the discussion about housing isn't "there is no affordable housing
anywhere", but rather "there is no affordable housing near jobs and people
have to commute very far", so I'm not sure there is a tonne of daylight
between these two.

I feel you on the zoning issue, there is plenty of space that should be
upzoned, but I don't think that this line is true: "A very substantial amount
of inexpensive housing can be built where zoning currently disallows it."

Land costs are high, Permitting costs and fees are high, and construction
costs themselves are very high atm, even if you're not putting in elevators or
steel frame construction you're going to have very high costs that you can't
recoup from low income renters.

Maybe if you introduced a land tax that made it expensive to have unimproved
single family homes you could get somewhere, but as it is I don't think SF has
the balance sheet to just spend its way out of this problem right now.

But even then, I think this is a problem that will take decades to resolve,
since SF has gotten itself into a chicken & egg situation where everything is
expensive because everything else is expensive.

