alt Hacker News> The solution is pretty simple: build and unreasonable amount of housing. And entirely new cities.
So it is not simple. "Just build more" always comes up in those discussions, and while it does help (and has been proven to help), it is not the definite answer for the housing issues.
Build a new city from the ground up with a bunch of cheap modern housing, walkable and all modern goodies and ... nobody will move. People don't move just because housing is cheap. Actually many people are willing to spend a significant amount of their income to live in specific places. We move to have a job, to build a career, to be close to friends and family, to have better access to entertainment and activities, ...
This is why most developed country experience rural flight. The housing crisis is (mostly) a big city problem. You can usually find extremely cheap housing if you go deep in the countryside. And building is also cheaper (the price of the land is less, there is less permits issues, etc).
And for big cities, "build more" is way more challenging. Ground space is limited, so one solution is to build more vertical, but it is costly and has its own limitation. Spreading may cause issue with water management and require big investment in a public transport infrastructure if you don't want to have a nightmare traffic. Pollution can be a very big issue, etc. And that's for all the non-political issues. The political side of things can get very messy, very quickly.
If there was a simple solution, every big city in the world would have done it by now.
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It would of course be a functioning state's responsibility to plan urban/city development and economic incentives to move there. Regarding the ownership vs renter housing debate: I think Singapore may be an excellent example of a state doing it's duty: affordable state-owned housing and people are distributed per housing per the national demographics so you also build social coherence vs ghetto-fication.
> Build a new city from the ground up with a bunch of cheap modern housing, walkable and all modern goodies and ... nobody will move.
If you build a city full of empty buildings in a place with minimal existing population like the Alaskan wilderness then obviously. But what if you double the housing stock in all the existing cities where people want to live?
> Ground space is limited, so one solution is to build more vertical, but it is costly and has its own limitation.
Extremely tall buildings can get pretty expensive, but moderate height buildings (e.g. five stories) have similar per-unit construction costs to single family homes. Meanwhile now count the number of places you can draw a 100 mile radius where the median height of the existing buildings is even that tall. It might literally be nowhere in the US.
Notice also the extent to which density can thwart the scarcity of land. You put a five story building with four units per story on a plot of land instead of a single family home and the contribution per unit of the cost of land has gone down by 95%.
I don’t agree. Orlando was nothing. Raleigh research triangle park was nothing. Silicon Valley was nothing until they were. Each of them were built from a single seed project: Disney, State grant of free land and two roads being built, NASA facility respectively.
We could also recognize that at certain levels of development single family residences are no longer viable. The government should use eminent domain to take entire blocks back for redevelopment vertically. They should be required to give the home owners triple the value of The property they are taking in the form of replacement square footage or a property in the new development and one or more properties elsewhere. Imagine ing each nimby stood to have a windfall in the form of multiple properties they could rent or sell in exchange for giving up their property. There would be a lot less resistance. Not no resistance but a lot less.
Build the infrastructure, plan the city grid like we used to, incentivize employers to move headquarters there, build new factories, create special economic zones. There are tons of options.
We could increase supply and demand by having a “grow to 1 billion Americans” project. We would create a path to citizenship for people with a requirement that they help build and/or finance the build of homes store fronts etc. create a targeted immigration plan so the new metro is comprised of a broad range of culture, ages, income levels and skills so cultural mixing occurs and assimilation into the shared American experience is facilitated. Make the new metros operate on lower minimum wage, grant 5 year tax abatement for individuals, give the land away for free. Then once the city is established in 20 years do the same thing.
> nobody will move. People don't move just because housing is cheap.
Judging by what I see happening in Texas where the mentality definitely is build, build, build...people definitely do choose to live in the way flung out there suburbs and actively look to move there. Just around DFW places like Prosper, Forney, Weatherford, Burelson, and far more continue to attract tons of people wanting to buy a house even if its way flung out there. People drive from as far out as Kyle and Serenada and consider themselves part of Austin. Houston is about done with its third highway loop, TX SH 99. Tons of people don't blink an eye about having an hour long commute it seems.
I'd argue this isn't a great way to build our cities without also laying the groundwork for decent transit but you can't say people aren't choosing it. I kind of like the multi-polar MSA setup in some ways that we have here in DFW, although it could be a lot better. If you're wanting a more urban lifestyle, you don't have to be directly in Dallas.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_State_Highway_99
> Ground space is limited
For a lot of the US this just isn't true. It is true for several notable big cities in the US though, I will agree. Can't really add more land to San Francisco or Manhattan cheaply.
Rural real estate prices just keep going up while the population goes down. You'd expect the opposite, but it's not happening. As long as everything except real estate is cheap and pensions are high, old people will never sell. They consider themselves to be saintly generous to leave real estate to their (then also elderly) children when they die.
Free land for internal colonisation was a successful policy that almost every country in the recent past has employed. Even small countries.
> it is not the definite answer for the housing issues.
it kind of is.
Actually we already had a solution to this, normalized remote work.
If I can work remote for Citadel from a 6 bedroom house in North Dakota it’s a choice to rent a studio apartment in Manhattan.
Not to mention the massive environmental benefits of taking cars off the streets. If you have mobility issues, working remote is a game changer. For those who need to use wheelchairs it’s miles easier to work from home. The nightmare of public transportation while in a wheelchair isn’t something I’d wish on anyone