It's a bit counter intuitive, but the best way to lower the cost of housing for the poor is to build more housing for the upper middle class and up. They will trade up houses which will increase the supply of used houses driving down their price. It's essentially impossible to build something new that will be cost competitive with something that already exists.
Why does a pod need a kitchen and bathroom? If it had those it'd be called a studio apartment. A pod is essentially anything from a dorm room styled apartment to a half-height room big enough to have a bed to sleep in and a shelf for a few items (like the Japanese have). In any of those cases you'd have communal kitchens and bathrooms. This would actually also be good socially because as we become more digitally immersed it provides a public area to meet new people, just like how it was in college.
These all went away by the late 60s in New York. They wouldn't be legal now. For one thing, buildings, or floors, were restricted to either men or women. And they didn't allow children, or more than one person/room. But they allowed people just getting started--working clearing tables, or washing dishes, etc--to be able to live near where they worked.
Annoying. I lived in a SRO (I just called it a studio apartment with a shared bathroom) for 3.5 years that was run by a co-op apartment building. This was in Seattle. Having a shared bathroom was an annoyance (shared between 4 men - never more than a sentence said to two of them) but I was more than happy to put up with it versus having to deal with roommates. It was also cheaper than having roommates in a variety of houses that I looked at. I had more space than all those rooms for rent I looked at. I often wish I could've kept that kind of housing when I moved to the bay area because everything here is so outlandishly expensive just to get your own bit of space and that housing was so cheap for me.
Second one was a former HoJo parked while awaiting condo conversion. Imagine a hotel room stripped of all furniture, with a single kitchen per floor. Had to wash my dishes in the bathtub, but otherwise it worked for me.
EDIT: just looked it up, xenophobia of course. New Yorkers didn't like immigrants living in Manhattan in 1955.
Basic human dignity? Being forced to share an intimate thing such as a bathroom with strangers or depending on strangers not eating your food/trashing your stuff or not being able to feed yourself because another person is cooking a 5-rounds-meal is not something that should be acceptable in a developed nation.
So you can save money - but not much - by not having full appliances. You can save a lot more by not building a full kitchen and a second bathroom.
Think about bathrooms; my childhood home and my grandparent's home both only had 1 bathroom. My grandparent's was on the second floor with enough room for a sink with a toilet on one side and bathtub on the other. Mine was toilet, sink and single standing shower.
Newer homes started having a guest toilet. Then guest/second bath and master bath. Now newer constructions seem to have 1 bathroom per bedroom as well a guest. All while increasing the size of the bathroom. And increasing the size of the bedroom. And the size of the closets. And so on.
I bought a 3 br 2 ba ranch. Currently my 2 sons are 1 and 6, I don't need the second bathroom. It's nice when we have guests but when we don't it just sits there.
I see many new constructions but not any that are even close in size or price to what I have. I also see the older lots being bought and redeveloped.
Nobody expects car manufacturers to build new run-down clunkers they sell for $200... they build new cars and people who can’t afford them generally buy cheap used ones!
Houses are the same way. A nice house built in the 80s is going to be way better than a cheap house built today. Outdated looking quality construction > modern looking cheap crap.
> You don't really save all that much money by building a barely livable pod vs an actual apartment.
Okay, so build normal size apartments then. Even if it's the same price as a house 2-3 hours away, you're removing 3-6 hours of commute time.
The important part is splitting land costs over tens of units instead of just one or two, not exactly how many tens.
300 sq ft is a quite livable studio apartment, with enough room for a bathroom and (compact) kitchen.
with that said, yes, any additional housing is better than none.
The problem is that housing in any location is not a closed system with fixed demand. It is an open system in which increased supply can generate increased demand.
When you build that housing for upper middle class and up, they vacate their homes, the price of their old homes goes down, then upper middle class and up people who previously decided to live in a cheaper area over paying the extreme rent costs move in, the population grows, and the price break never fully flows down market to the poor people in the city. This is why the market approach to building more housing isn't going to solve the whole problem. You need to build new homes at every pricing level and the market generally doesn't do that without the government incentivizing them.
It does because the poor people move into the housing that the upper middle class vacated. Population growth is an independent confounding factor. In other words, housing cost can still go up due to population growth but they would go up less if the new luxury housing is built.
> You need to build new homes at every pricing level
But you can't. You have high fixed costs like land, hook ups to the city utilities, architect work, plumbing, electrical, permits, and HVAC. These are pretty much the same regardless of how big of a house you build. The stuff that varies directly with size like dry wall, paint, framing, flooring, etc. doesn't cost that much. And even then the more you do at one time the cheaper it gets. In other words, hanging the last section of drywall costs a lot less than hanging the first one because you incur all of the over head to hang that first sheet.
The end result is that you can't build a new house that a poor person can afford. They probably can't even afford the fixed costs. Even if you could, it wouldn't be economically viable. You're way better off spending the ~10% more to get a upper middle class house that you can sell for 50-100% more. It's still good for affordability because you've increase supply. Everybody takes one step up the ladder and the benefit will trickle down to the poor.
That only works if the system is closed. If housing in the bay area goes down in price, you get people moving in from New York, LA, Boston, Austin, etc who previously avoided the area due to costs. Do you just ship off those poor people to those vacated homes hundred or thousands of miles away?
>Population growth is an independent confounding factor. In other words, housing cost can still go up due to population growth but they would go up less if the new luxury housing is built.
This is of course true. The question is just will building new luxury housing increase population growth to an extent that swallows the whole price break before it ever flows down to the bottom of the market?
>But you can't. You have high fixed costs like land, hook ups to the city utilities, architect work, plumbing, electrical, permits, and HVAC.
The reason housing in the bay area is so high has nothing to do with fixed material costs or else housing everywhere would be that astronomical. The reason housing is so high is because demand is high and the supply of land is limited. Land is the primary costs. You fight that by building vertically. The higher the building, the lower the marginal cost of land for each unit and therefore things become more affordable. But like I said in my first post, this doesn't happen if everything is left up to the market because it isn't the way to be most profitable, so the government would need to be involved to incentivize this.
Yes, and the other direction too, if NYC dropped hugely in price probably a lot of people would move from SF. If a city manages to solve its housing problem in some enormous way some of the benefit would go to other cities.
The reverse is true too, SF building nowhere near enough will cause people to move away and drive up housing prices in other places like Austin. This sounds more like the reality today.
It's a real effect, but it seems like the best action for people who need housing is still to build more.
The main thing is does luxury housing act like a totally separate market. For example, if no affordable luxury 2bd apartments are available, will a software engineer move to Boston from SF instead of settling for an ordinary 2bd apartment. I'd expect the majority of the time high-income people who can't afford luxury apartments simply displace middle-income people in ordinary apartments rather than move cities, but I don't have hard data on it.
If that were true the bay area would have been empty long ago because of the ridiculous housing cost. Fact is most people won't change cities for lower housing cost.
>The reason housing in the bay area is so high has nothing to do with fixed material costs or else housing everywhere would be that astronomical. The reason housing is so high is because demand is high and the supply of land is limited. Land is the primary costs. You fight that by building vertically. The higher the building, the lower the marginal cost of land for each unit and therefore things become more affordable. But like I said in my first post, this doesn't happen if everything is left up to the market because it isn't the way to be most profitable, so the government would need to be involved to incentivize this.
Developers are putting 5 on 1 buildings every where they possibly can because it's the most economically efficient use of the land. They can't in the bay area because of zoning restrictions. Remove the zoning restrictions and you'd see skyrocketing density.
Do you genuinely think that housing costs don't factor into which cities people choose to live? I'm not sure this conversation can go anywhere beneficial if we can't agree on that fundamental and in my opinion obvious fact.
There is a ton of pent-up demand in the bay area, because this has been going on for a long time. People who own houses there are going to fight you the whole way.
Developers will build as long as it seems profitable to do so. Presumably this means that when the prices do go down, a few projects will end up in the red when they're done.
Fit the whole extended family into the 1br unit.
I've seen a craigslist ad in LA for barracks style bunk beds for rent near downtown in a shitty looking room, 500/mo.
At least the poor would have the choice between the barely livable pod in downtown, or a house 2 hours commute away. Currently they can only choose the latter.