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"Make it easy to build new houses" seems to be a mix between
... and I'm not sure which one this is.
As an architectural professional, this misses the point. It's as easy as it's ever been to buy a plot of farmland for relative pennies vaguely near a major metro and throw up a cookie-cutter exurban subdivision full of builder-grade single-family homes. The cost has gone up due to inflation, but if anything bureaucratic and administrative expenses have dropped as a percentage of the overall cost. Builders are constantly fighting new code provisions that would increase costs, but on average most new code revisions add something on the order of a couple thousand dollars of cost to the average new home -- basically nothing against the current average sales price. Most of the cost in a new home is materials and (espescially) contractor labor and profit -- if builders want to offer cheaper standard homes, they ultimately will have to reduce their own cut.
What people are actually talking about when this comes up, is building denser housing closer in. Local zoning regulations often explicitly prohibit multi-family housing in large swathes of cities, especially the kinds most desired by families (townhomes and multiplexes, rather than large apartment complexes). It's easier to build less expensive housing closer to where people want to live, if it can be made legal to build new, middle-density homes where more density is in demand, and even to convert large single-family properties into livable duplexes (such as can be found in cities like Boston and Seattle).
There are other initiatives that I'm more ambivalent about -- for example, the push to change the building code to permit single-stair apartment buildings, that @[email protected] mentions below. This would put American building practice more in alignment with European practice, but I am personally of the opinion that the requirement in US codes for multiple means of egress is one of the most significant safety improvements we've made, and single-stair towers, in combination with the related design philosophy for residents to shelter in place during a fire, was one of the largest contributors to tragedies like Grenfell. But the advocates do have a point that egress requirements do dramatically reduce the efficiency of the typical apartment tower floorplate in the US, and there is probably a way to balance out the risk with other fire protection features.
Yep, developers are already building unlivable shit boxes as it is, you don't want to lower standards even more.
Some regulations could be looked at (like parking minimums), but you have to be real careful that you're not just enabling developers to build substandard housing. I saw a YouTube video recently where some guy was advocating removing stairwells from buildings that are mandated by fire codes, and that strikes me as a dangerous idea.
the best version of this is removing zoning restrictions on multi-units. But if we don't ~~redacted~~ the landlords, they'll still take advantage of us.
It would be funny if someone was against increasing the supply of housing in general terms
Hot take. Stop making so many new people so we don't have to live crowded like ants and destroying all our environment to provide housing.
Just stop having so many children.
Society can handle many many more people, they just choose not to so they can have their SUVs and newest iphones.
The more humans we have the worse we will live.
I suppose it's a moral choice. More people living worse or less people living better.
I prefer the later. Specially because the prize is just having less children, it's just a small cultural change.
I get nothing out of a crowded world where I have to be miserable just to make space for more people.
Less people being able to live to their fullest seems the more humanist approach.
population control is just advocating for eugenics
No it's not.
They aren't advocating for population control, they are advocating for individuals to make their own decisions wisely.
Edit: Nevermind. https://lemmy.world/comment/13130336
That's already happened. US birthrates have been below replacement rates for over a decade, and most of Europe before that.
My european country population keeps growing each years and birth/death rate while was good over some time (more death than births) is turning around once again and births are again skyrocketing.
We only had a few sensible years of decreasing population, since 2018 aprox population is again on the rise here.
Pretty sure US population has also being growing lately instead of decreasing as it should.
US population is only growing due to immigration. Birth rates are well below replacement rate.
Then maybe it's not only US and Europe the countries which should control birthrate.
The thing is that there is too many people. Land cannot house so many. We are destroying nature just because some people insist to bring more and more and more humans to this world.
There's plenty of land. Consider that in 1930, Germany had 139 people per km^2, France had something around 65 people per km^2. The US today has only 38 per km^2. But the German or French citizen in 1930 didn't use quite so many single use plastics.
That's pretty idiotic. We don't have a shortage of land. We have a shortage of land within a reasonable commuting distance of job centers.
Which is then wasted on urban sprawl and parking lots. We don't have a land problem or an overpopulation problem. We have a sustainability problem.
Each human needs a LOT of land to live to their fullest.
Do you want to live like in the 30s only to house more people?
Also it's an unsustainable point of view. If you defend letting people forever grow there's going to be a hard natural stop to that. Because at some point nature will make you stop.
I support a stable point of view. One billion of human beings on earth. Plenty space for us and for nature, les pollution, less emissions. Lots of chances for massive natural reserves...
1 billion people living unsustainably is still unsustainable. Birth rates in the most unsustainable countries are dropping, and this is ultimately a good thing, but it's insufficient on its own.
By simple math each of those 1 billion people should be able to live with 10 times more resources at hand that if we had 10 billion people.
I don't think there's a way to live better without resource consumption and environmental damage. So the question keeps being the same. More people living worse or less people living better.
This is becoming a global problem. It's not just that you can't easily build houses anywhere, there's also the fact that housing is mostly built for profit so if prices go too low, new housing stops being built. I think you can see where this is going.
Do whatever's needed to increase affordability except anything that will reduce the value of my house.
That's basically the two sides.
...keep building legal and easy housing. Megacorps and oligarchs get crushed when the bubble pops underneath them.
Don't worry we'll bail them out like we always do
Well, it'll ding them. But the ones hurt worst will be those invested in the ponzi scheme that is the american retirement system.
Like at my last job my tiny nothing of a 401k was invested in mortgage holdings. Had the bubble burst then all my money would be gone.
"Marginal Utility" - $10,000 is a lot to me. Its not worth stooping over to pick up for a Blackrock Exec.
Literally everyone agrees that more housing should be built and it shouldn't be too hard to do so (just don't sacrifice safety standards). However, simply building more housing isn't enough. A lot of the housing built nowadays are built for the rich while there aren't many small starter-homes being built. We need to do so much more than just building more homes, or else we risk the rich just buying them all up again.
This is myopic thinking. We all live in one big housing market. If you don't have enough houses built, it doesn't provide housing for the working class. You just end up with multi-millionaires living in tiny homes.
When you restrict the ability of builders to build new homes, they focus on maximizing the profit of the few homes they can make. We had cheap housing in the US in eras where we made it possible for builders to build vast numbers of housing on a colossal scale. That way you can really harness economies of scale and drive down the price tremendously.
There are two ways to make money by making something. You can either make high-margin luxury goods, or you can make vast numbers of low-margin affordable goods. Our current restrictions on home buildings encourage developer to take the former path, when we want to encourage them to take the latter.
EVERY BUILDING project in my city is upscale rich housing.
Whenever someone says they aim to make it "easier to build houses", I feel they just mean they'll remove certain standards. Not the "must have this many parking spaces" standards which we can do without, the "do we really need a fire ladder?" standards. And then the house is sold at the same price(+inflation) than before because the cost cut all goes to the builder, not the buyer.
If you assume the building company is exploiting every change in regulation (they do like money after all), small changes do nothing and you readily adopt more extreme views (and if you're racists you blame the people with neither money nor power, but that's expected of them).
So you'll be interested in California's solution. If the project contains enough low income housing and the city won't approve it the developer can just build it anyways. All the safety standards are still required, they just can't be stopped from building it. And if they build it within a certain distance of a light rail stop they don't have to include parking.
I love this
At first, yes, but eventually prices come down when there's a glut of supply
We're disproving this really fast in California. It turns out developers want to build single family homes. It's more profitable to them than buildings.
It depends where you are, in the UK we have american HOA level regulations on house building, your permission can be denied because of the shade of your roof tiles or because the sheds are using the wrong shape of corrugated roofing sheets. Of course the problem is more that these things are very ill defined and the local planning office gets incredibly petty with the power they're given.
I've never met a person actually making that argument, though. I'm certainly not advocating removing building safety codes, only the NIMBY bullshit like exclusionary zoning that was literally designed to keep people of color far away from white people. Even the opening paragraphs of Wikipedia page for the YIMBY movement say it's primarily in favor of removing things like exclusionary zoning and parking minimums:
The YIMBY movement (short for "yes in my back yard") is a pro-housing movement[1] that focuses on encouraging new housing, opposing density limits (such as single-family zoning), and supporting public transportation. It stands in opposition to NIMBY ("not in my back yard") tendencies, which generally oppose most forms of urban development in order to maintain the status quo.[2][3][4]
As a popular organized movement in the United States, the YIMBY movement began in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 2010s amid a housing affordability crisis and has subsequently become a potent political force in local, state, and national[5][6] politics in the United States.[7][8]
The YIMBY position supports increasing the supply of housing within cities where housing costs have escalated to unaffordable levels.[9] They have also supported infrastructure development projects like improving housing development[10] (especially for affordable housing[11] or trailer parks[12]), high-speed rail lines,[13][4] homeless shelters,[14] day cares,[15] schools, universities and colleges,[16][17] bike lanes, and pedestrian safety infrastructure.[3] YIMBYs often seek rezoning that would allow denser housing to be produced or the repurposing of obsolete buildings, such as shopping malls, into housing.[18][19][20] Cities that have adopted YIMBY policies have seen substantial increase in housing supply and reductions in rent.[21]
The YIMBY movement has supporters across the political spectrum, including left-leaning adherents who believe housing production is a social justice issue, free-market libertarian proponents who think the supply of housing should not be regulated by the government, and environmentalists who believe land use reform will slow down exurban development into natural areas.[22] Some YIMBYs also support efforts to shape growth in the public interest such as transit-oriented development,[23][24] green construction,[25] or expanding the role of public housing. YIMBYs argue cities can be made increasingly affordable and accessible by building more infill housing,[26][27][28]: 1 and that greenhouse gas emissions will be reduced by denser cities.[29]
This has that twitter style 'make up a dude to get mad at' vibe to it.