I think a pivotal part of your statement is "close". Close in time and close in distance are not necessarily mutually inclusive. There are many things we could do to to break this coupling if we had the will to spend the time and resources innovating on improving the human condition, but everyone is too busy trying to get theirs to do it. Those with the resources are incentivized to keep the status quo and often even use those resources to ensure their continued control of how and where people live to ensure their profits.

She points out many things that would help and yet I am unsure by how much. There is only so much land in and around most major cities. Anything “affordable” with access to desirable things will not remain so for long. The most likely outcome in my mind is endless tracts of poorly thought out suburban development, more reliance on cars and less on public transit, thus exacerbating other problems. Yes SF has some special and critical issues but demand to live in and around the city will always outstrip supply. There are a few places that have tried to do suburban city planning well, but even if you buy into a walkable neighborhood with jobs, who stays put at a job for more than a few years? Most people will still want new opportunities that will put them back in their cars.

I would love to think that remote work will solve some of this, but myself and many others do not find that fulfilling or sustainable in the same way as even being in the office 2-3 days a week. RTO is increasingly becoming a trend, which I personally find unfortunate but can understand.

We can and should get rid of some dated zoning restrictions and ineffective leaders but it’s not going to be a panacea by any means.

Residential skyscrapers + modern subway trains that go to suburbs made up of residential skyscrapers are the solution. I visited my friend in Kuala Lumpur. I went from downtown to outside the city in just 10-15 minutes and went direct from the metro station to the condo block, about 60 meters. These clusters of skyscrapers form mini cities with access to many necessities, and then you can just take the metro to other clusters. Or if you really want to, you can drive. Other cities have much better metro systems.

Commuting to the office wouldn’t be so bad if it just meant taking a train for 20 minutes while you read HN.

I’m lucky enough to live with my parents in a rural area, but if I ever move out to San Francisco or NYC for work I will probably try to find the smallest possible apartment. I don’t need a kitchen or table. I just need a bed, wardrobe, and lockable door. I’ve spent enough time in hostels around the world to know I could make it.

Another less infrastructure heavy option would be to build places to live with less parking, more mid rises (~5 stories), and good transit (this can just be dedicated bus lanes and traffic lights that switch automatically when a bus goes through at the cheapest)

That sounds like a pretty amazing layout. Maybe in 100 years we will have something like that in the US!

As a single person, I do not think living in a city is that big a challenge. Sure it’s expensive, you still have to hustle, but you can get a studio or roommates or even live with family, that is how people get by.

Once you are partnered and have kids it becomes much more challenging. I know someone who raised a family of five kids in a 2BR in Chicago, it can be done. But it’s a cultural issue: that is what poor people do, and nobody wants to feel poor. So we expect to have a big house that is unaffordable in the city and we move to cheaper climes and commute.

The nuclear family is a big part of the problem. Going back to multi-generational housing with little private space is not a super popular option, but Gen Z seems to be dipping their toes…

It is kinda fascinating. I just returned from US roadtrip ( UT region ) and there is a lot of unused space. Remote could help with a lot of it were it not for 'old school management'( quotation marks, because that is the current PC terms for luddites ).

Not only is there a lot of unused space, but the legislature and developer oligarchs are firmly in bed with each other. As an example, right in the heart of one of the fastest growing areas of the valley, one of the most prolific apartment building developers is being given tailor made QOZs on which to build low income units.

Building on these gives the developer a perpetual abeyance on any capital gains, they don't have to pay tax on their profit at all! These QOZs were intended to incentivize the development of land in rural areas where development is not being done by the capital class, but are being abused to put money in the pockets of the rich to ensure there's somewhere to keep the slave class close by all the tech bros so they can cook their lunch.

Heaven forbid they were actually used in rural areas and created jobs where these humans could leave the city and seek some semblance of self-determination.

Paving over every square inch of the country is the opposite of a solution. The more we entrench ourselves everywhere, the more we are affected by natural phenomena like forest fires and flash floods. And that is without even considering the effects on the ecosystem. Turning Death Valley or Yosemite into a parking lot with a suburb attached isn't a good idea. We need to get past the frame of thinking that every american can and should have a white picket fence for their own personal green-grassed fiefdom. That's not sustainable.

It is if you prevent the population from growing, meaning you have to limit immigration.

> There is only so much land in and around most major cities.

It's weird that this is such a common thought in a world where Tokyo exists.

You can build an almost unlimited number of floors on that limited land, and it has been done with brilliant results!

The real estate market is driven by speculation no? So that has to be solved before building more is ever going to be a useful option. Otherwise we just pour gas on the fire of real estate speculation by expanding the size of the bubble. Building supply without any restriction in demand just scales the problem up linearly in proportion to the money put into new development.

Supply would absolutely help with the problem, but it's not sufficient.

To discourage speculation, governments should impose land value tax, but not property tax, to encourage efficient use of land. You'll also need to pair with other reform, like changing how zoning should be done, how transportation is planned, and so forth.

Land value tax has some issues as well. The zoning reform might be able to dix them, but only with some micromanaging I think. If we want walkable areas, that means multi-use zoning. Not all land uses have the same roi, so if you set the land value relative to the value that comes from using it for the highest roi case, say case A, then no one will use land for case B or C. So to take it to hyperbole, you'd end up with blocks of liquor stores and no housing, or all housing and no grocers. It is a complicated problem, and the solution will also be complicated.

Could you elaborate on how building apartments specifically for low income residents would do this? My county has started buying old hotels and whatnot to convert for their uses.

> The real estate market is driven by speculation no?

No, it's driven by supply and demand.

It's really not.

Well, it is a demand, but not a supply and demand balance of housing supply, but a supply and demand balance of speculation. In other words, there’s a high demand for speculation (profit) in the housing market.

How do you figure?

If more houses are built, prices will go down.

This is clearly not true if you observe actual real estate and rental prices and as long as we continue to allow corporations to own a majority of development projects, it should be obvious this won't work. The profit incentive doesn't work this way, and they are better off just letting a home sit empty than to dilute the value of their portfolio by selling or renting low to compete against themselves.

I disagree with this notion. Rental values are often controlled algorithmically. Given the low inventory of housing for sale, it’s possible for the monopolists to purchase the new homes and use vacancy in order to maintain higher levels of pricing for the portfolio by artificially controlling the supply levels.

If property taxes were evaluated the same way for the landlords as for everyone else, that wouldn't be feasible would it? And home maintenance and insurance for unoccupied homes is typically very high. There is also the risk of squatting or the cost of people to prevent that.

Has anyone done some math on the housing density that is most economical? My guess would be that the height limit would be close to five or six stories before the engineering to go higher was excessive, but that is just a wild guess. Courtyards down to ground level so people can have an external view seem wasteful from a heating and cooling perspective, most people don't want to live with no windows.

Yeah this fairy tale that we dont build enough because of regulation is told everywhere. Even in countries with rapidly declining population and long reign of right wing anti regulation governments.

The real solution would be to fight the speculation and accept acces to a home as a human right. So prohibit/tax unrented rentals, progressively taxes owning multiple homes.

I live in a poorer EU country where foreign money bought everything they could. They dont even bother renting it out because increase of the value of the properties is where the money is. If they started to rent the evaulations would fall.

The plural of "the monopolists" is an interesting concept :)

I think the word is "cartel".

"Oligopoly" if you're an economist.

There is not perfect price elasticity in the housing market. The demand for housing right now is pretty much infinite because of the speculation. In other words, the housing price is not based on supply, but it’s based on the demand. And the demand is being driven by speculators.

The answer is to remove housing as an investment vehicle. Also prohibiting the ownership of multiple houses by a single individual or institution.

> The real estate market is driven by speculation no?

When two things happen concurrently, it can be hard to tell cause and effect apart.

In reality, real estate speculation is driven by the simple fact that prices always go up, making it one of the best investments there is for those with enough cash.

If you legalize massive housing construction, housing prices will start going down, and the speculation money will have to go elsewhere.

Which leads to the real problem. People have been treating real estate like an investment for decades now. You're essentially going to wipe out the wealth of all the middle class by doing so, so you're up against an immovable wall of political incentive for the current system to persist.

How would the latter help with the former?

By making more supply (housing units) available in greater variety, at lower cost, and more quickly we can drive down their price and make it possible to satisfy more demand.

Unfortunately a lot of folks think that housing doesn't follow the same simple economic rules that we've observed for all other physical goods. So they don't allow supply and we continue to spiral deeper and deeper into a housing crisis.

If housing were abundant, we wouldn't be reading articles about the rise of living in cars.

The problem with a lot of these places like Seattle is that adding to the supply is really hard. It's not like there are a million acres of land just waiting to have houses put on them. Sure, you can build a skyrise, but first you need to get permission of the 20 families whose homes you're going to raze.

This is nonsense. American cities (especially west coast) make it extremely difficult to build anything anywhere, even on parking lots and crumbling warehouses. There are vacant lots all over SF, in some of the most expensive neighborhoods on earth. Nobody has "raze homes". The hard part is getting permission from 20 retirees who show up at planning meetings and oppose everything on the grounds of fear of change and who think that seeing the sight of a 5 story building is an environmental catastrophe.

I’m not sure; every time we allow people to build more unconstrained, what gets built is luxury housing and upscale office buildings. This is obvious; given a choice, this is what nets the most profit.

In a functional market where demand signal drives production the value of a thing declines as it ages. Japan has this figured out. Tokyo is relatively affordable because it is possible to build just about any form of housing anywhere.

Further, there isn't unlimited demand at every price point. When you constrain supply to the point that high-end demand can consume more than total possibly supply, of course builders only build to the high end of the market.

Finally, we've made the high end of the market the only thing which can possibly pencil out by driving up costs. Planners demand low floor area ratios, high parking rates, articulated facades, parks dedications, high impact fees - that money ultimately comes from the buyer or the renter. So by making those demands you price out increasingly large portions of the population.

I am not from USA but it’s the same even in my country. There are too many silver snowflakes out there fantasising about a “free” reign real estate development and in their dreamy reality they imagine that somehow benefiting the “people magically. They can’t even fathom the extent to which these things are rigged and artificially projected e.g. price.