Links - 23rd July 2024 (1 - Housing)

Globe editorial: How changing an old rule about stairs could unlock a lot of new housing - The Globe and Mail - "Apartment buildings of three or more storeys require two exits. This has been part Canada’s building code since 1941. It was rooted in fire safety, which made sense decades ago. Like parking and development charges, the rule makes less sense today. It also makes Canada a global outlier.  Single-stair buildings – also known as point access blocks – are common around the world, and in accordance with modern fire-safety standards. In countries such as Germany, single-stair buildings of up to seven storeys are permitted.  Such designs, whether there’s an elevator or stairs, allow for more family-friendly housing with multibedroom homes, something the missing middle is supposed to deliver. The homes are grouped around a stairwell, without the long hallways familiar in North America, and those dwellings have more windows, for light and ventilation. Single-stair buildings can also be built on smaller lots. Requiring two staircases forces builders of apartments to a hotel-style layout, that long hallway with homes on either side. The result is usually a row of one-bedroom homes.  It also means builders have to assemble more land to make a project feasible. Like parking and development charges, two staircases can quietly make housing more expensive – and the homes less pleasant to live in... B.C. is the first province to consider the change... The California state legislature last year passed a bill to start work on updating building standards to include single-stair designs. In Ontario, the idea is on the table, proposed in early 2022 by an expert panel, but no further action has occurred. One of the leading voices for reform is Conrad Speckert at LGA Architectural Partners in Toronto. He grew up near Zurich in a single-stair building and after moving to Canada was surprised to see the “hostility with which small apartment buildings have been actively discouraged in this country.”  A century ago, apartments flourished in Canadian cities – before strict zoning rules disallowed them on most civic land. In recent years, apartment buildings have been unfairly consigned to busy arterial roads. The same thing continues to happen, as Toronto city council this week debated allowing small apartment buildings on what it calls “major streets.”"
Clearly this rule is necessary for safety and to prevent greedy developers from exploiting poor people and profiting off their deaths. The rest of the world is inhumane for not having this rule.
Greedy developers only want to build one bedroom condos for investors. Joel Kotkin: Urban sprawl, the environmentally friendly answer to expensive housing - "you cannot blame the left entirely for these conditions. In many places, governments that identified as conservative have embraced such things as “urban growth boundaries”  and greenbelts that restrict new housing on the fringe; according to research by demographer Wendell Cox , virtually all the most expensive places in the English speaking world — Australia, New Zealand, the U.S. as well as Britain — have imposed such policies, with similarly awful results... Another assertion commonly made is that high density appeals overwhelmingly to younger people. To be sure, there has long been a niche market for dense urbanism, particularly among the young. Yet as they enter their 30s and family formation years, they are turning out to be as attracted to the periphery as older generations, with more than eight out of ten young Canadian families preferring suburbia. In the U.S. two thirds of millennials , before the pandemic, favoured lower density neighbourhoods and consistently shifted towards suburban areas . The pandemic and the rise of remote work accelerated this trend. For many millennials, working at home addresses issues, according to a Conference Board survey, like work-life balance. At the same time, the decline in office use has made locating in a dense, often expensive, place near the central business district far less compelling. As dense living loses some of its appeal, planners and their real estate allies increasingly rest their case on the notion that suburbs are bad for the planet. But in reality, according to projections for California by the Terner Center at UC Berkeley , working under the assumption that housing development would be limited to infill (no greenfield development), the emissions savings of 1.8 million tons would contribute only one percentage point to the mandated state reduction by 2030... many new suburban areas, as MIT professor Alan Berger suggests, are being designed in consciously more sustainable ways, employing sophisticated systems for controlling energy and water use, make suburban and exurban communities ever more environmentally sustainable... Urbanized land in the United States is about three per cent of the total which, notes demographer Cox, is about the same in Canada, calculated by government statistics, when you exclude the largely frozen north. Australia is even more empty." Leigh Beadon on X - "Really it's because they *don't* truly intend for their pro-development policies to lead to lower rents Here's the explainer from the California Yimby website saying that if rent ever gets pushed down... it's a problem and developers must be able to rapidly raise it soon after."
wanye on X - "This is very silly for two reasons:
1. First of all, what they’re saying here is that rents in new construction cannot be artificially constrained below what it costs for developers to recoup their investment. It’s actually beneath intelligent people to have to explain why that’s the case.
2. By extension, it should be clear that nobody is saying it would be bad if rents fell overall. The statement here is about new construction. The existence of new car models every year, by analogy, probably does a lot to push down the price of used vehicles, but a law that made new model year vehicles unprofitable would stop that entire process in its tracks."
*blocked by commie*
wanye on X - "Predictable. You know, on some level it’s beneath communists to try to make economic arguments. They have no idea what they’re talking about and practically everything they argue for is easily refuted on basic logic grounds. They should really just stick with the “don’t you hate rich people?” stuff. That’s embarrassing, in its own way, but it’s less embarrassing than their economic arguments." Baltimore Wants to Sell Hundreds of Vacant Homes for $1 Each - "Baltimore plans to sell boarded-up houses for $1 each in an attempt to revive neighborhoods that have been plagued by crime and disrepair.  The program backed by Mayor Brandon Scott will offer more than 200 city-owned vacant properties to residents who commit to repairing and living in them. A city board approved the measure on Wednesday.   Vacant homes are a decades-long problem in the Maryland city, which has one of the highest crime rates in the US concentrated within a few high-poverty neighborhoods. The measure evokes Baltimore’s “dollar house” program from the 1970s, which offered properties for a buck to homesteaders if they fixed them up. A similar effort has also been attempted in Newark, New Jersey. "
They'll become vacant again in a matter of time Liberal NIMBYism: the most despicable form of hypocrisy? - "In staunchly liberal enclaves all over the country, citizens who profess to progressive environmentalism in the abstract are thwarting local efforts to increase the sustainability of their immediate environment. Whether it’s suing over bike lanes in Park Slope, Brooklyn, or blocking a bus rapid transit system in Berkeley, Calif., the children of the summer of love appear to have grown up, grown old, and grown immune to the needs of their descendants.  Ryan Avent, online economics editor for The Economist, says that there is something even more damaging to the environment than efforts to block sustainability initiatives within cities. Perhaps without even realizing it, city dwellers are pushing to keep their neighborhoods expensive and inaccessible by preventing new dense, vertical real estate development within them... Net emissions fall a lot more when someone from Houston moves to New York than when someone from New York starts biking. By preventing highrises and putting whole neighborhoods off limits for historical reasons, residents of America’s most beloved cities are in effect pricing others out of those cities. This means more sprawl on the outskirts, more transit by car and a higher average per capita carbon footprint for everyone." Stephen Hoskins 🔰🏗️🧦🪩 on X - "The median American voter somehow believes all of these things at once:
- I am entitled to own a quarter-acre plot of land within close proximity of a city
- The judicial system should recognize my ownership of that plot
- The police should defend my plot from trespassers
- The military should defend my plot from foreign invaders
- The government should prevent my neighbors from building things I dislike on their land
- That plot should be serviced by roads, water infrastructure, good schools
- Those public services which give my plot its value should be funded by taxes on workers, not by property taxes
- The plot's value should steadily increase as society improves around me
- If I do have to pay property taxes, they should increase very slowly
- When I retire, those property taxes should be capped
- When I die, I should be able to pass the plot to my children, tax free
- When I take a big mortgage to buy this plot, the government should insure it to make sure I get a low interest rate
- That interest rate should not change over 30 years
- Any mortgage interest I pay should be able to be deducted from my income taxes
- If this system produces homeless people, the government should clear them away so they don't harm my property value
- If a public project increases my property value, that's mine
- If a public project reduces my property value, I deserve compensation" A Luxury Apartment Rises in a Poor Neighborhood. What Happens Next? - The New York Times - "New apartment buildings often look to activists like precisely the problem. Let developers build more housing, particularly in poorer neighborhoods, and tenant groups and neighbors fear the market will heat up and their rents will rise. Economists, on the other hand, tend to see new buildings as the solution. The only way to ease a housing shortage that’s pushing up rents, they say, is to build more housing. Construct enough of it — even if it’s high-end housing — and rents in general will fall... Researchers at N.Y.U., the Upjohn Institute and the University of Minnesota have all looked at what happens immediately surrounding new large-scale apartments that are market-rate (no rent restrictions). Many studies already show that regions that build more are more affordable (and regions that restrict new housing are less so). These latest studies ask if that pattern holds when we zoom in to individual blocks. Taken together, their findings suggest that new housing can ease rising rents in other buildings close by... “Renters don’t like new high-rises because they see new high-rises and rents going up at the same time,” said Xiaodi Li, a doctoral fellow at the N.Y.U. Furman Center who has studied the effect of new housing in New York City. Neighbors may assume that the high-rises cause the high rents. That’s plausible if new buildings attract much wealthier residents, who in turn attract higher-end amenities that make a neighborhood more desirable. “The key question here,” Ms. Li said, “is what’s the net effect?” She finds in New York that new buildings do attract more restaurants and cafes nearby. But she concludes that any effect those amenities have pushing up local rents is swamped by the power of new supply to push rents down. On net, she finds, for every 10 percent increase in housing supply, rents for properties within 500 feet drop by 1 percent, relative to other high-demand areas... Neither study means that rents actually fall. Rather, they suggest that new buildings slow the pace of rent increases in the kinds of neighborhoods that developers have already identified as hot. By the time those developers arrive — particularly with plans for large-scale projects — rents are most likely already rising rapidly."
Left wingers think the world is static, not dynamic, and also think prices are arbitrary and are set by "greed"
This guy who hated apartments claimed that low income people couldn't afford high rise apartments, then when I posted evidence that new high rise apartments reduced rent, professed to be shocked that "projects decrease the property value of surrounding areas". When you want to have it both ways... New apartment buildings in low-income areas decrease nearby rents - "Previous research from Mast showed that building new multi-unit buildings helps keep rents down across a metropolitan area as people vacate their old homes to move into new buildings, setting off a ripple effect that opens more homes. That may be true for the region, skeptics countered, but surely specific buildings make the blocks around them less affordable... The researchers call it a “simple story of supply and demand”: blocking home construction will not keep rich people from moving to a neighborhood. Instead, the rich will just outbid residents for existing housing. The opposite happens when rich people choose a brand-new unit instead: rents decrease and more renters have more choices." American Dream of Homeownership Is Falling Apart With High Mortgage Rates - Bloomberg - "Historically, those able to afford the upfront costs of buying a home were able to lock in a cheaper monthly housing bill — including property taxes, insurance and mortgage payments — than renters. That changed in 2022, when mortgage rates rose at the fastest clip in decades, with owners last month paying 35% of their income on housing compared to just 29% for renters, according to real estate brokerage Zillow Group Inc. In fact, it's now cheaper to pay for an apartment than to own the typical home in all but one of the 35 major metros in the US, Zillow data show... A popular mantra among real estate agents may have encouraged some to buy beyond their means: “marry the house and date the rate.” Some lenders sweetened deals with offers to refinance for free. But it’s not just borrowing costs. Soaring insurance premiums and higher property taxes have Americans spending more on their homes than ever before."
This doesn't stop left wingers claiming that if you're able to pay rent, you should be able to qualify for a mortgage The Death of the Dining Room - The Atlantic - "The dining room is the closest thing the American home has to an appendix—a dispensable feature that served some more important function at an earlier stage of architectural evolution. Many of them sit gathering dust, patiently awaiting the next “dinner holiday” on Easter or Thanksgiving.  That’s why the classic, walled-off dining room is getting harder to find in new single-family houses. It won’t be missed by many. Americans now tend to eat in spaces that double as kitchens or living rooms—a small price to pay for making the most of their square footage. But in many new apartments, even a space to put a table and chairs is absent. Eating is relegated to couches and bedrooms, and hosting a meal has become virtually impossible. This isn’t simply a response to consumer preferences. The housing crisis—and the arbitrary regulations that fuel it—is killing off places to eat whether we like it or not, designing loneliness into American floor plans. If dining space keeps dying, the U.S. might not have a chance to get it back... This is partly a response to shrinking household size. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the share of one-person households more than tripled from 1940 to 2020. A dedicated dining space might feel wasted on someone who lives alone. And for young, unmarried apartment dwellers with only a roommate or two, developers typically sacrifice a common dining space in order to maximize personal space.  As households and dining spaces have contracted, the number of people eating alone has grown... Stephen Smith doesn’t buy that the death of dining space is purely a function of consumer preferences. In most U.S. cities, he told me, building codes mandate double-loaded corridors—or two rows of apartments along a hall—making larger units difficult to build. “When you can only build small apartments with one wall of windows, rooms will naturally disappear,” he said. “Nobody wants a dining room without a window.” In cities across the country, apartments are shrinking, even as single-family homes continue to grow. The difference is that many of the former are subject to arbitrary zoning rules that limit the total amount of floor area that can be built—in places where apartments can be built at all. Combine an acute housing shortage with tight zoning rules (as in cities such as New York and Los Angeles), and you end up with a lot of tiny apartments and few dining rooms." How Zoning Broke the American City - The Atlantic - "Between mandating parking garages and banning apartments, it has made infill development prohibitively difficult in many American cities. And in suburbs across the country, it has made the starter homes we so desperately need—think townhouses and homes on small lots—effectively illegal to build. If Americans want a fairer, more prosperous nation, zoning has got to go. The housing-affordability crisis is, at its most basic, a problem of supply and demand... In nearly every major U.S. city, apartments are banned in at least 70 percent of residential areas. San Jose prohibits apartments in 94 percent of its residential areas. The most a developer can build in these zones is a detached single-family home. Beyond apartment bans, a host of other zoning regulations limit housing supply. Rules such as height limits, minimum setbacks, and floor-area ratios curtail the development potential of most residential areas. In San Luis Obispo, the “High-Density Residential” zone—the most liberal residential district in the city—limits buildings to a 35-foot height and mandates large lawns. Where apartments can be built at all, these specifications mean the complexes won’t host many units. Apartments aren’t the only type of housing snarled by zoning. In cities, many zoning codes ban single-room occupancies (SROs)—better known as boarding or rooming houses—in which residents rent a furnished private bedroom with a shared kitchen and bathroom. Where they’re allowed, SROs serve as a housing safety net, providing exceptionally affordable accommodations to low-income singles. In the postwar period, however, many cities—including New York—modified their zoning to ban them. Manufactured homes⁠—trailers or mobile homes⁠—once filled a similar niche in suburban and rural communities. Yet, as with SROs, many zoning codes ban manufactured housing. In fact, some Florida municipalities incorporated themselves specifically to prohibit it. Manufactured homes⁠—trailers or mobile homes⁠—once filled a similar niche in suburban and rural communities. Yet, as with SROs, many zoning codes ban manufactured housing. In fact, some Florida municipalities incorporated themselves specifically to prohibit it. But banning affordable housing doesn’t make expensive housing more accessible. By putting a floor on housing markets, zoning has merely locked out everyone who cannot clear that floor. It’s a system that puts those with means on a treadmill of ever-rising rents, and puts those without means on the streets. Absent zoning reform, the situation is only going to get worse. For every zoning rule prohibiting new housing, a half-dozen rules inflate the prices of the housing that actually gets built. Consider minimum lot sizes, which require developers to set aside a certain amount of land for each home. These rules are common in single-family zoning districts, where lot size is a key driver of costs. Although they serve a health-and-safety function in rural areas—where, for example, sewer hookups may be unavailable—these rules serve no such purpose in most cities and suburbs. Ample research has shown that minimum lot sizes are a major culprit for rising housing costs... Minimum parking requirements do similar damage in cities. These mandate that for each new unit of housing, a developer must also build some number of off-street parking spaces. While developers have both the incentive and local knowledge to determine how much parking a project requires—too few spaces and the units won’t sell; too many spaces and the developers waste money—minimum parking requirements supersede their judgment with often-arbitrary standards.  In my hometown of Lexington, Kentucky, for example, a single-family home must provide one off-street parking space. But a duplex must provide four. And an apartment building must provide 1.5 spaces per unit or 0.9 per bedroom—whichever is greater. In other words, the city’s zoning mandates more off-street parking for the kind of housing—urban and affordable—whose residents are least likely to own a car. Call that what you will, but it’s not planning... At best you get a more expensive home. At worst, the project proves too expensive for developers, and you get nothing. Why did zoning get so restrictive? Until recently, zoning constituted a relatively minor check on overall housing construction. Through World War II, many American zoning codes remained flexible by modern standards, even though they were often designed to be exclusionary. Land-use categories remained broad, density restrictions were largely limited to height and lot coverage, and most development occurred without much fuss.  This has unraveled over the past 50 years, as cities and suburbs across the country have aggressively expanded use segregation, tightened density rules, and imposed months of additional public review.  What changed? The most compelling theory holds that a mixture of rapid inflation and generous federal-tax policy encouraged homeowners to treat their house as an investment, providing a strong incentive to oppose new construction. If true, this suggests a bleak future for zoning... Consider America’s lone unzoned major city. Houston twice put zoning to a citywide vote, where it lost because of opposition from working-class voters of all races. As a result, land-use regulation in Houston is largely focused on regulating actual nuisances, like noisy neighbors or slaughterhouses; the city’s few zoninglike regulations, such as minimum lot sizes and parking mandates, are on the way out. Blocks that want stricter rules can voluntarily opt into them through private deed restrictions. But they can’t just show up at public hearings and shout their preferences into law.  The results speak for themselves. Houston builds housing at 14 times the rate of peers like San Jose. And it isn’t just sprawl: In 2019, Houston built roughly the same number of apartments as Los Angeles, despite being half its size... To be clear, Houston has made its share of planning mistakes. But, free of zoning, the city can constantly remake itself. That Houston is now one of the most affordable and diverse cities in the country is no accident. Even in a post-zoning world, we will need planners to facilitate subsidized housing, protect natural areas, and map out safe streets and parks—all issues where Houston is improving at a faster clip than most American cities. Perhaps if planners weren’t compelled by zoning codes to micromanage strip malls or keep fourplexes out of cul-de-sacs, they could do some actual planning."
It's simpler to blame capitalism, investors, foreign buyers, greedy landlords, big companies buying up housing etc. Clearly in places with less regulation where housing is cheaper, it's because there's less "greed"
Simplistic left wing static thinking strikes again White House Funds to Convert Offices to Housing Find Few Takers - Bloomberg - "Citing lengthy delays and red tape, developers have been slow to tap a Biden administration program designed to finance office conversions near transit...
Located about a block from Pittsburgh’s Union Station, Gulf Tower is the exactly the kind of project USDOT had in mind, at least on paper. But Stauber soon discovered that the White House program wouldn’t be workable for him. For one, he said getting approval for funds would take 18 to 24 months. “In a typical real estate financing deal, you’re closing that loan within 60 to 90 days,” he says.  Others who have tried to tap this financing report similar barriers. Lengthy approvals, strict environmental reviews and tight credit criteria — standards designed with interstate rail projects in mind — have put this financing out of reach for many developers. And a requirement that projects be located within a half-mile of a train station, not just local forms of transit, potentially disqualifies entire cities. So far, no transit-oriented development loans have closed under these Build America Bureau funds, though three projects are currently in an active underwriting phase... In a plea for assistance, the Pittsburgh City Council issued a proclamation in January calling on the White House to ease regulatory burdens around RRIF. The city recommended amending the closing period from 18 months to six and dropping the NEPA review for a traditional environmental report, among other items."
Corporate greed strikes again. Proof we need even more regulation! Meme - wanye @wanyeburkett: "I keep telling you: people don’t get supply and demand. They really struggle with it. It’s not just ideology. They really struggle with the concept."
Charlotte 🇵🇸 @charlottor: "Someone please explain to me, like I am a five year old, precisely what the incentive is for the private sector to build houses in such quantities that the amount of money they can charge us for those houses goes down"
Charlotte has a trans flag as well as a Palestinian flag in her profile, and lists pronouns, so that explains it Stephen Hoskins 🔰🏗️🧦🪩 on X - "🚨Wake up babe, new study of market-rate housing just published🚨 (Spoiler: it's a banger) 🧵 Xiaodi Li found that when a new luxury apartment is built in NYC: 📉 nearby house prices fall 📉 nearby rents fall 🧑‍🍳more restaurants open up & ⚖️low-rent units do not see rent hikes"
Do new housing units in your backyard raise your rents? - "There is a growing debate about whether new housing units increase rents for immediately surrounding apartments. Some argue new market-rate development produces a supply effect, which should alleviate the demand pressure on existing housing units and decrease their rents. Others contend that new development will attract high-income households and new amenities, generating an amenity effect and driving up rents. I contribute to this debate by estimating the impact of new high-rises on nearby residential rents, residential property sales prices and restaurant openings in New York City. To address the selection bias that developers are more likely to build new high-rises in fast-appreciating areas, I restrict the sample to residential properties near approved new high-rises and exploit the plausibly exogenous timing of completion conditional upon the timing of approval. I provide event study evidence that within 500 ft, for every 10% increase in the housing stock, rents decrease by 1%; and for every 10% increase in the condo stock, condo sales prices decrease by 0.9%. In addition, I show that new high-rises attract new restaurants, which is consistent with the hypothesis about amenity effects. However, I find that the supply effect dominates the amenity effect, causing net reductions in the rents and sales prices of nearby residential properties."
This won't stop left wingers hating "luxury" apartments and insisting that only "affordable" housing should be built