How this usually works:

"I'd do anything for lower housing prices!"

Build more housing.

"...but I won't do that."

Greece has the exact same problem. Rents are skyrocketing and people can't afford to live in their own cities. We're building more housing, but it doesn't seem to be helping.

Maybe SF doesn't want to build more housing, but this isn't universal.

It's probably not enough new housing is getting built. People don't even remember what a real large-scale housing spree looks like, because these last happened generations ago. These are transformative events. eg in Athens in the 1950s-1970s : https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20191011-the-surprising-...

Indeed - in fact I live in a suburb of Lisbon that was just fields maybe 30 years ago - I am continually astonished at the vast scale of reasonable quality high density housing, all with schools, parks, hospitals etc - there must be hundreds of thousands of people here, a miracle of urban planning. Apparently the Lisbon middle classes fled to these new suburbs to get away from their small damp draughty downtown apartments, which ironically have now become so desirable.

My experience with most people saying "we are building more housing" is that they drastically overestimate how much housing is getting built, especially relative to yesteryear. If you look at net increase in units YoY, it's usually quite modest even for booming, "in-demand" areas.

The other part is that the same things that make it slower to build more housing also make it more expensive, all the various bureaucratic processes.

Also the kind of housing being built matters greatly. If cities continue to zone for single family homes, the increase to supply will not be significant.

Furthermore builders will need to be incentivized appropriately otherwise we'd get an abundance of luxury apartments (higher margins).

If housing units are increasing in double digit percentages per year, then we're talking! Otherwise, it's at best keeping up with population growth.

Time is money. The longer you spend time on a process, the longer you spend on people to just babysit, and the more inflation ticks up the cost of materials.

This was posted a few days ago to /r/neoliberal and /r/yimby

https://old.reddit.com/r/yimby/comments/wz3tq0/anything_but_...

Meatloaf as an authoritarian city councillor. Seems legit.

In my area of Germany new 3-4 room apartments(!) sell for 500-700k€. Waiting lists for parcels of land which must be allocated by the city stretch out for years. Old houses even in poor condition and needing major work start around 300k€.

This is not some metropolis or even medium city. Quite the opposite.

> The nice thing about indoor space is that we can make pretty much as much of it as we'd like.

What? Have you ever been in Lisbon? The city is pretty dense as it is. You could mostly just build higher, and that has its limits too, depending on the structure and foundation.

Adding more housing outside the core of the city might not be attractive enough. And increasing the density of people also means you need to increase the density of services (public and private) and utilities, which also comes with its own problem.

lol Lisbon is crowded.

Lisbon: 6,452/km2

Barcelona: 16,000/km2

NYC: 25,000+/km2 (depends on the source)

Lower East Side NYC: 33,600/km2 - due to zoning regs, there are very few buildings over 9 stories... but every building is 9 stories!

Lower East Side NYC 1910: 144,000+/km2 - visit https://www.tenement.org/ to learn more.

Kowloon Walled City, 1970s: ~2M/km2 !!! - inspiring 1000s of dystopian Sci Fi stories from Akira to Blade Runner. https://www.google.com/search?q=Kowloon+Walled+City

http://demographia.com/db-nyc-sector1800.htm

District I live in Vienna, Austria

25,000/km2

It’s pretty quiet too! :)

I live in an area with 25/km^2 and my fiance complains that there are too many

Why does everyone want to live in Lisbon?

There are other decent metropolises in Portugal and other fun spots around the country not to get crammed in the capital.

Libson is a global city, easy air access to pretty much everywhere in europe/us/asia, good international schools, low cost of living, and very importantly, very mild, california-like weather. Once you have kids, you need access to good international schools so that they can integrate back into US public schools/colleges without getting left behind academically. Also you have access to a lot more culture and night life than out in the country. For young people the dating pool in large cities is very deep. Getting out of Libson/Porto as an expat, dating can be difficult if you're not a fluent speaker of the local language, and Portuguese is wildly different from Spanish when spoken, even though they look similar on paper.

That's where job opportunities are, and that's why more housing will increase the opportunities, and then the price of housing...

For a post-Covid world where remote job opportunities are on the rise, this is becoming less and less of a pressing matter.

People can work from nearby towns where housing costs are relatively moderate and just hit the head office in Lisbon one or two times a week.

Corporations and people need to adapt to the changing circumstances and to be open to make the necessary adjustments to advance in this world.

Not all people can work remotely!

This is the exact way that janitors and baristas and everyone servicing those 100k+ a year software engineers is priced out.

Remote work is certainly a way to de-focus big metropolis, a bit.

Usually for work-related reasons.

Even outside it.

Took a train to Sintra, there were endless and endless 6 story-miles long buildings forever. Portugal seems insanely dense.

Have you been to San Francisco?

Lisbon: 100.05 km^2 , 544k people

San Francisco: 121.48 km^2, 873k people

20% more room than Lisbon, 60% more people.

And SF isn't exactly a model of good urban planning either. It could double or triple its density and be just fine!

40 story skyscrapers with apartments in the city center should solve the issue.

Yep. Gotta love even more cars and people / m2, as if traffic wasn't bad enough as it is. Some people really just think the solution is to cram more people into an already overflowing place. And please don't compare with SF or NY. Those are definitely not models. Everyone knows how shit the traffic is there. A good urban planning will limit population density by, among others, limiting height of buildings.

They can build higher than that. New apartment/condo towers in Tokyo are routinely over 50 stories, and that's in a place that gets earthquakes routinely.

Nope, that’s the ultimate illusion. Portugal is already one of the EU countries with more houses per capita. More houses means more houses for foreigners. Locals would never be able to afford them.

This is just the dark side of globalism cheered by Portuguese politics for decades. Competition is global now. Local middle class is having their lunch eaten by foreign rich people or even middle classes from wealthier countries while the unrestricted influx of emmigrants from poorer countries keep sallaries down.

Suck it up and enjoy.

> More houses means more houses for foreigners. Locals would never be able to afford them

How do you arrive to that conclusion?

- If you built 100 million new houses in Lisbon, would prices fall?

- If you built 10 million new houses in Lisbon, would prices fall?

- If you built 1 million new houses in Lisbon, would prices fall?

- If you built 100k new houses in Lisbon, would prices fall?

- If you built 10k new houses in Lisbon, would prices fall?

- If you built 1k new houses in Lisbon, would prices fall?

Even if you have a model that says that building more houses raises prices for some number of houses, surely increasing the number will eventually make prices fall, wouldn't you agree?

Where is that number? Shouldn't the discussion about how big is that number, and how to achieve building that many houses?

"Supply increses lead to price increases" is a pretty extraordinary claim, and the only charitable interpretation of it is with the addition of "up to a point". Where is that point? Why not make the charitable interpretation yourself that people recommending more housing are recommending more housing past the price increase point?

To be clear, I don't believe that the supply/price curve is anything but sloping downwards, but even if your one does have a hump, being against housing still sounds like a bad conclusion.

Interestingly, building new houses won't necessarily make prices go down, as we'll all just compete for the more desirable ones, and pay whatever we can afford to 'get ahead of the Jones'. It might mean that the quality of what we end up living in is better though as the rubbish houses get left unfilled.

Anyway, the problems is not so much that there is not enough housing, but that it is on the wrong place.

OK, so with 100m new houses in Lisbon, keeping up with the Joneses would keep the prices up, gotcha.

What works in theory doesn't work on reality. That's why I called it the ultimate illusion. With such a global demand for houses here is not feasible to increase the house supply fast enough to drop prices in a way that locals can afford them. You're just feeding the beast: globalization. The only way to tackle it is on the demand side.

Globalization is inevitable. What I don't buy is the rate of change, it _must_ be smooth or the system may implode. Blind and raw globalization is just a way to feed the nationalisms that most people are afraid of.

Nope. Zoning and licensing is in the hands of politicians and construction lobbies vying for the best places to build high-value housing, which is where they get the most return.

And those folks are voted in and supported by voters who like the fact that their homes quintuple in value. The same goes for any investment properties they buy.

In what way is building more housing simple? If it were that straightforward, California (which has much more space and money) would have done it, and Californians wouldn't be moving to Portugal.

For many decades, California has had extremely restrictive building regulations, especially in the most desirable areas. That is slowly changing, but the actual building has always been straightforward. It is getting the permission to do so that is complicated, expensive, and often just impossible.

Agreed on all counts, but that doesn't make the problem of politics any less real. People problems are always the hardest to solve, especially when deeply problematic policies like Prop 13 are written into the state constitution.

You could say that it's technically simple but politically complex, sure.

But what that amounts to is, "we could do it, but collectively don't feel like it."

The most desirable areas aren't filled with buildings at every corner.

That's a permissions problem, not a demand problem. If the free market would be let loose there, we'd have skyscrapers on every block. The issue is nibmy-oriented citizens who are actively resisting that.

Price per sq m, they usually are. And price is pretty much driven by desirability.

Ah yes, California, where a developer in Berkeley spent 12 years fighting the city to build a six-story apartment building, which was then built in

six weeks. People were moving in three months after breaking ground.

The physical building of houses and even raising the capital to buy the materials and labor to build some sort of house capable of housing people, is not anywhere near the choke point in California. Eliminate the zoning and building inspectors and associated enforcement mechanisms and the houses would pop up.

I guarantee if California said tomorrow, "build what you like on your land, there will be no permits required!" People would flock to build on the land. Whether the dangers of that outweighs the dangers of homelessness and high price families spend on rent that makes healthcare, healthy food, and education less affordable, is an exercise for the reader.

It's very technically simple. Humans have been building housing, dense housing even, for millennia. Yes, standards are higher now, but we also have technological improvements.

The challenge is nearly always political in nature: a lot of vested interests want to go out of their way to make it harder to build more housing.

In 2000, Houston had a population of 3.8M in 2020 it was 6.3 M. From

https://www.macrotrends.net/cities/23014/houston/population

They have also managed this with affordable housing.

That's something to learn from.

Texas has allowed lots of houses to be built. It's perfectly doable. CA did it until the 1980s.

Check out Arbitrary Lines by Nolan Gray for how Zoning stops people building houses.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/59613917-arbitrary-lines

we somehow managed to build houses for thousands of years, so it can't be that hard, can it? the scarcity is entirely artificial.

Historically most people didn’t live in single family homes. They lived in very crowded, multi-generational and small dwellings connected to many neighbors. Shared public spaces were used for getting together, etc. Most dwellings did not have kitchens, etc. Our idea of a home for “regular people” is radically different than what people have lived in.

People need to probably drastically limit what they think of when they think of affordable housing. Think multi-family homes where each dwelling supports 4 people and is < 800 sq-feet. 1 bathroom, 1 communal area (w/ small range + table) and 2 bedrooms.

Look to the disposable homes of Japan I guess.

or you could just legalize building anything other than single family dwellings. there's a lot of room in between quarter acre lot suburbia, and a crowded favela! look up "missing middle housing". the problem is purely a matter of restrictive zoning.

The cost of materials and labor is really high for most people, not to mention land. And then there’s maintenance. It’s out of reach for most people. Populations are so much larger than they were 100 years ago and people want increasingly large dwellings.

I think the tiny home concept makes sense as it’s trailers without the stigma. But yes, we probably need to think of a new type of town built around small properties that are pre-fab and disposable outside the connecting infrastructure.

I don’t think dense towers are the answer though.

No, no, no, we don't need a "new type of town" built around some pre-fab gimmick. Literally you just need to lift zoning restrictions (and related bureaucratic crap like discretionary design review) and legalize building things that are slightly-to-moderately more dense than single family home suburban houses. That doesn't mean "dense towers".

Suppose you see a man strangling himself, and he wants to know how to get out of his predicament. Does he need a VC-backed startup to sell him an anti-strangulation machine? No, he just needs to stop strangling himself! To hell with "innovation".

Land prices in the US (or the UK, or any other place with a housing crisis) are not a limiting factor, if anything they're what would fuel the construction if it were allowed to happen. Property values within cities are so inflated precisely because of the zoning which makes it impossible to build the kind of housing needed to serve the immense demand.

Housing is only “affordable” if it’s subsidized. This is because construction and maintenance are out of reach for most people. New housing stock is expensive. Even if you use cheap materials, they need to be replaced in 10 years.

So even if you build multi-family dwellings, the crisis isn’t resolved because the cost of construction, maintenance, and property taxes are out of reach. Unless it is subsidized. The UK is evidence of this. Almost all their housing is multi-family and dense and unit size is small even by European standards. But it’s expensive still. And they keep building.

Japan is a good example of a place where there isn’t a housing crisis and it’s because homes are mainly disposable and very small.

No, Japan is a good example of a place where there isn't a housing crisis because you are actually allowed to build things. They don't have strict zoning there! You can mostly build what you want to, by right!

>So even if you build multi-family dwellings, the crisis isn’t resolved because the cost of construction, maintenance, and property taxes are out of reach. Unless it is subsidized. The UK is evidence of this. Almost all their housing is multi-family and dense and unit size is small even by European standards. But it’s expensive still. And they keep building.

No, this is totally, completely wrong, the housing crisis here is not because of materials or labour costs. It is a policy failure: a sluggish, capricious planning system, entrenched NIMBYism and politicians that cave to it, massive legal restrictions on supply, and subsidies to demand. We aren't building enough, there is a massive shortfall in housing supply.

See this thread: https://nitter.net/AntBreach/status/1121362679367598080

The same thing would happen with those that is happening with trailer parks; companies buy the land they are on and triple the rent because they can.

There weren’t many building restrictions prior to the 20th century. Earthquakes, fires and wars provided a sort of natural urban renewal.

Zoning restrictions != building codes

The lack of housing in gigantic states like California is baffling to me as someone who comes from an incredibly densely populated country.

I find it hugely frustrating, but it's not that complicated. Ever since prop 13 passed in 1978, homeowners' property tax has been pegged to the purchase price rather than the assessed value, creating a huge disincentive to sell. In a place like LA, most or all of the habitable land has been developed. The lots that are undeveloped (at least those in my neighborhood) are sketchy—steep grades and sandy soil, which will eventually crumble either due to a megastorm or earthquake. No one wants to sell to developers, and why would they? They live in nice houses that get more valuable every year, in a nice part of the country with nice weather. Beyond that, they oppose every housing development imaginable, usually by arguing that "luxury condos" are replacing "rare green spaces." (There's a whole "Save Poppy Peak" campaign near me, which is infuriating, because it's a bunch of people with $1.5 million+ houses who don't want apartments to get in the way of their view.)

There are all sorts of obvious political fixes to this (repeal prop 13, end single-family zoning, incentivize building mixed-use, mixed-income residences, whatever), but I can't imagine any passing any time soon. Homeowners have all the power, fight all these changes tooth and nail (often through lawsuits against developers on environmental protection grounds) at the local level.

Californian's have at every chance voted to make themselves landed gentry. That means low property taxes, restrictive zoning, and often just total bans on building. At a hyperlocal scale it makes sense, allowing things to be built can be bad for the homeowner next door, it just leads to the insane home prices we see now.

It gives me pause when an obvious action is actively rejected for decades, but still is asserted as a "simple" solution.

It might be the _right_ solution, but if it failed to be adopted for so long it can't be that simple, isn't it ?

In this case, it really is simple. It's just the opposition is vehement.

Then it doesn’t satisfy the opposition’s requirement, and they happen to be stronger than the ones behind the “simple” solution.

They are an active party, so you can’t just say “it works, but only if these people don’t exist”. This means the “simple” solution only applies to an imaginary world, and an actual solution requires a lot more thought and adjustment to accommodate for the reality of the problem.

There is a profit incentive to increase housing prices for developers. Doing something to decrease prices will hurt their bottom line, so they just let the prices rise

You can induce demand too. Somehow they'll have to limit that demand.

By definition, functional cities induce demand.

Yeah, Portugal should simply tear down all the old mouldy buildings of Lisbon and replace them with shiny skyscrapers, so each and every Portuguese can have their very own flat in Lisbon.

Or if they're crazy enough to want to keep these old buildings they could just build all the skycrapers in the park surrounding peak Monsanto, easy.

/s

The purpose of housing is to house people.

Historical buildings are nice, but for apartment blocks at least, yes, the priority has to be actually housing people. You can always require historical-looking facades if looks are a concern.

> You can always require historical-looking facades if looks are a concern.

I assume you have actually seen the inside of old buildings with your own eyes.

In no way is the look & feel of the inside of an old building comparable to a modern one.

Yes, old buildings sure have downsides. But pretending nobody looses anything when you only keep historical (or even just historical looking) facades is eyewash.

I bet there are ways for the Portuguese Gvt to encourage renovation of all the dilapidated old style buildings instead of encouraging speculators to wait for them to collapse so they can build new and cheap and with loosing every bit of charm a building can have.

The grandparent does rather seem to want to replace Lisbon with Disneyland.