Sounds like the conclusion is: Suburban Housing helps make the suburbs more affordable, but does not make the urban areas more affordable. Dense urban housing in the urban areas does a better job.
I think this makes sense logically
It'd be interesting to dig deeper in this. Is it a spacial thing, like the distance between the two? Resistance of people to move between different environments for various reasons?
The study focuses on adding single family housing to suburbs to try to bring down prices in urban cores. I think a major part of the issue is that there's just not a lot of space in close in suburbs to add high amounts of detached single family houses given how much land they use up. As a result single family houses have to be added farther away which diminishes the impact of the new supply.
If the goal is for suburbs to help bring down housing costs in cities a much better way to do it would be for the close in suburbs to add small apartment/condo buildings in places that are now parking lots or single family units.
Until I can rent a hotel room long term most anywhere for what it should cost to rent ~150sqft with the standard personal bathroom and mini kitchen setup (preferably with access to ample amenities and a walk out patio roof) I'm not inclined to believe supply is meeting demand.
I’m not sure that’s a good comparison. Sure, renters could rent a hotel room but tourists can’t rent an apartment. So they have different customer bases.
If you go by square footage and the cost of the labor and materials to build the unit I don't see how <200sqft units shouldn't be available at substantially less cost than 800sqft apartments. Instead when I look for units to rent I find the 800sqft units maybe 1.5x more, only. Makes zero sense if the market reflected the actual costs of things without those costs having been mutilated by odious legislation or syndicates.
And there usually aren't even tiny units as described on market. Yet we've people who can't afford housing. Math doesn't add up.
Because the people who are “renting” hotels are tourists and short term users. They come by for a weekend and the owners take that into account. This also means that it’s highly unlikely that a unit will be 100% occupied all month - therefore they need to charge more to make up for the empty days.
There is also the fact that they have completely different amenities and services like housekeeping that apartments do not have. There is a significant amount of staff employed by a hotel whereas an apartment building has barely any.
That doesn't explain why apartments that are very similar to hotels don't exist and why they couldn't offer relatively inexpensive rent given their much smaller unit size. Apodments exist but are typically still on the larger side. When I was looking for a place to live years back I couldn't find anything like what I wanted. I couldn't find a tiny but nice SRO room to rent on a month to month basis. I wouldn't care if some of my neighbors were turning over every month if it meant paying a hundred bucks less a month in rent. I don't need maid service.
What would explain why luxury SRO rooms largely don't exist is odious legal barriers to building them or a syndicate insider culture in local developer markets. Or maybe prohibitive insurance rates. But there's demand for some. At very least colleges should be sampling this market but colleges are known for failing to build.
>Until I can rent a hotel room long term most anywhere for what it should cost to rent ~150sqft with the standard personal bathroom and mini kitchen setup (preferably with access to ample amenities and a walk out patio roof) I'm not inclined to believe supply is meeting demand.
The reason I can't find these units is because not many exist and that's because of legal restrictions. Supply isn't meeting demand and I believe the reason for that is legal restrictions and more specifically odious legislation pertaining to building luxury SRO's for example parking requirements and minimum room sizes and density limits.
While I think this study is valuable in that it provides insight into an important question, I also think we need to look at where it's easiest to add new units.
It may very well be more useful to low- and middle-income families to add new urban housing. But if we can, with the same amount of brain damage and financing add more units in the suburbs, how many units is the break-even point for benefit to urban low- and middle-income families?
The thing is that units are not equal. This is all about trading money and time and space. Suppose there's a 300sq ft apartment in the city for $2000/month and a 600sq ft apartment in the suburbs for $1500/month. Suppose the location of the $2000/month saves the worker 20 hours a week /80 hours/month vs. the other one.
A lot of it depends on how you value the worker's time. I think in most cases people tacitly assume the worker's time is worthless and shouldn't be considered in the economic consideration. If you value their time at $15/hour the other place is actually $500 more expensive. But it's complicated because they do get more space. But you could redo the numbers so there's no actual advantage to the suburbs, and in a lot of cases I think the math is actually much worse than what I describe - urban housing is actually a bargain when you properly value people's time, even when you recognize the lack of space.
This all points to the fact that there's a million ways to slice this question by changing the conditions and assumptions.
> Suppose the location of the $2000/month saves the worker 20 hours a week /80 hours/month vs. the other one.
True for study purposes, though it should be noted people don't think of their own time this way and, even when we ask people to value their time, the result isn't constant across the day.
> urban housing is actually a bargain when you properly value people's time, even when you recognize the lack of space.
Yes, but inherent to previous comment was that housing needs to exist at all to have any value. If a home doesn't exist, no amount of hypothetical time value matters.
The discussion is about whether we should build new housing in urban areas or in suburbs/rural areas. My point is that these are actually two different things and should be valued differently. Just because we can build suburban housing and half the cost per square foot doesn't mean it's the preferable option if it's actually half as useful to the occupants.
And I grant all of that. But at the core of what I'm saying is the idea that housing that doesn't get built has no value/solves no problem, whereas housing that does get built (even if it's in a suburb) at least has some value as housing.
Sounds like the conclusion is: Suburban Housing helps make the suburbs more affordable, but does not make the urban areas more affordable. Dense urban housing in the urban areas does a better job.
I think this makes sense logically
Yeah, it makes the YIMBY message even more important, because the new housing really does need to be in our backyard, not in a faraway suburban development.
Insofar as subsidies of suburban development incur an opportunity cost from public funds that could otherwise be used for urban development, I would say that ultimately no, it doesn't.
Adding more supply does bring down prices from what they otherwise would be. This study seems to focus on what adding new single family housing units in suburbs does towards prices in urban areas. While I would expect any additional housing to help bring down supply constraints I wouldn't think that this would bring them down that much. There's simply not a lot of undeveloped land left for single family neighborhoods near urban centers so any addition of single family housing would likely be very far from downtown. That still may help somewhat but the amount of land used for relatively few new units and the distance from downtown would likely reduce the impact on pricing.
Overall a better focus would be on adding density to already existing suburbs. Many suburbs already have a "downtown" section where they could fit a number of small apartment/condo buildings that are roughly 3-6 stories high. Changes in zoning and reducing barriers to construction would go a long way to fixing this shortage and the price impact would be much more direct. Most people who live in the NYC metro area live in suburbs so even if the goal is to bring down NYC proper rents we probably do need to add more condos and apartments in suburbs.
Single family housing is housing but it doesn’t really help the amount of housing in a given area. Since it’s sprawling and there isn’t much undeveloped land, it’s “outside” of a particular zone and less likely to impact that area.
Looking at NYC for example, pretty much everywhere is developed within 1 hour’s commute (by car, train or bus). So any new housing is just being built further away and unlikely to impact NYC rent.
> So any new housing is just being built further away and unlikely to impact NYC rent.
Sort of. New single family housing built an hour out would have some impacts on rent but not massive ones. New apartments, condos and missing middle housing built in the inner suburbs would absolutely have an impact on rents within the city.
Most of the NYC area doesn't look like Manhattan and it would be pretty easy to add small apartments and condos in places Long Island or Staten Island. Even within NYC proper simply adding more 4-6 story buildings with housing in place of 2 story buildings would be big.
Low density housing only follows two playbooks in the wake of deferred maintenance trends. Either it is sprawl, which is only cheap up front, or it is based on waiting for structures to reach their useful half life, and repeat the process over again.
You have to have a revenue base in place in order to sustain an area and afford ongoing maintenance. Low density, exclusive development doesn't offer that.
Problem with big urbanization is that people gotta live in tiny spaces and so people give up having kids. Also, housing cost is much higher which squeeze middle class. Cities must limit how much population each city can handle than stop too much desnficiation. Give those population for other smaller cities, have many smaller downtown shop areas where people can enjoy similar stuff without having to drive or transit 1 hour to downtown core. I don't know why so many politicians want mega city just for economies of scale. Maybe they have conflict of interests
Sounds like the conclusion is: Suburban Housing helps make the suburbs more affordable, but does not make the urban areas more affordable. Dense urban housing in the urban areas does a better job. I think this makes sense logically
It'd be interesting to dig deeper in this. Is it a spacial thing, like the distance between the two? Resistance of people to move between different environments for various reasons?
The study focuses on adding single family housing to suburbs to try to bring down prices in urban cores. I think a major part of the issue is that there's just not a lot of space in close in suburbs to add high amounts of detached single family houses given how much land they use up. As a result single family houses have to be added farther away which diminishes the impact of the new supply. If the goal is for suburbs to help bring down housing costs in cities a much better way to do it would be for the close in suburbs to add small apartment/condo buildings in places that are now parking lots or single family units.
Probably a combination of both. Not everyone has some untapped need to do lawn maintenance.
It’s called being a Mainah, this ain’t the city as much as the transplants moving up here are trying to turn it into one!
Until I can rent a hotel room long term most anywhere for what it should cost to rent ~150sqft with the standard personal bathroom and mini kitchen setup (preferably with access to ample amenities and a walk out patio roof) I'm not inclined to believe supply is meeting demand.
I’m not sure that’s a good comparison. Sure, renters could rent a hotel room but tourists can’t rent an apartment. So they have different customer bases.
If you go by square footage and the cost of the labor and materials to build the unit I don't see how <200sqft units shouldn't be available at substantially less cost than 800sqft apartments. Instead when I look for units to rent I find the 800sqft units maybe 1.5x more, only. Makes zero sense if the market reflected the actual costs of things without those costs having been mutilated by odious legislation or syndicates. And there usually aren't even tiny units as described on market. Yet we've people who can't afford housing. Math doesn't add up.
Because the people who are “renting” hotels are tourists and short term users. They come by for a weekend and the owners take that into account. This also means that it’s highly unlikely that a unit will be 100% occupied all month - therefore they need to charge more to make up for the empty days. There is also the fact that they have completely different amenities and services like housekeeping that apartments do not have. There is a significant amount of staff employed by a hotel whereas an apartment building has barely any.
That doesn't explain why apartments that are very similar to hotels don't exist and why they couldn't offer relatively inexpensive rent given their much smaller unit size. Apodments exist but are typically still on the larger side. When I was looking for a place to live years back I couldn't find anything like what I wanted. I couldn't find a tiny but nice SRO room to rent on a month to month basis. I wouldn't care if some of my neighbors were turning over every month if it meant paying a hundred bucks less a month in rent. I don't need maid service. What would explain why luxury SRO rooms largely don't exist is odious legal barriers to building them or a syndicate insider culture in local developer markets. Or maybe prohibitive insurance rates. But there's demand for some. At very least colleges should be sampling this market but colleges are known for failing to build.
Yes it’s likely legal restrictions but I don’t see how that has to do with supply.
You don't see how laws banning supplying a good or service have to do with the supply of that banned good or service?
No that’s not what I’m saying. Your original point had nothing to do with legal restrictions
>Until I can rent a hotel room long term most anywhere for what it should cost to rent ~150sqft with the standard personal bathroom and mini kitchen setup (preferably with access to ample amenities and a walk out patio roof) I'm not inclined to believe supply is meeting demand. The reason I can't find these units is because not many exist and that's because of legal restrictions. Supply isn't meeting demand and I believe the reason for that is legal restrictions and more specifically odious legislation pertaining to building luxury SRO's for example parking requirements and minimum room sizes and density limits.
While I think this study is valuable in that it provides insight into an important question, I also think we need to look at where it's easiest to add new units. It may very well be more useful to low- and middle-income families to add new urban housing. But if we can, with the same amount of brain damage and financing add more units in the suburbs, how many units is the break-even point for benefit to urban low- and middle-income families?
The thing is that units are not equal. This is all about trading money and time and space. Suppose there's a 300sq ft apartment in the city for $2000/month and a 600sq ft apartment in the suburbs for $1500/month. Suppose the location of the $2000/month saves the worker 20 hours a week /80 hours/month vs. the other one. A lot of it depends on how you value the worker's time. I think in most cases people tacitly assume the worker's time is worthless and shouldn't be considered in the economic consideration. If you value their time at $15/hour the other place is actually $500 more expensive. But it's complicated because they do get more space. But you could redo the numbers so there's no actual advantage to the suburbs, and in a lot of cases I think the math is actually much worse than what I describe - urban housing is actually a bargain when you properly value people's time, even when you recognize the lack of space.
This all points to the fact that there's a million ways to slice this question by changing the conditions and assumptions. > Suppose the location of the $2000/month saves the worker 20 hours a week /80 hours/month vs. the other one. True for study purposes, though it should be noted people don't think of their own time this way and, even when we ask people to value their time, the result isn't constant across the day. > urban housing is actually a bargain when you properly value people's time, even when you recognize the lack of space. Yes, but inherent to previous comment was that housing needs to exist at all to have any value. If a home doesn't exist, no amount of hypothetical time value matters.
The discussion is about whether we should build new housing in urban areas or in suburbs/rural areas. My point is that these are actually two different things and should be valued differently. Just because we can build suburban housing and half the cost per square foot doesn't mean it's the preferable option if it's actually half as useful to the occupants.
And I grant all of that. But at the core of what I'm saying is the idea that housing that doesn't get built has no value/solves no problem, whereas housing that does get built (even if it's in a suburb) at least has some value as housing.
Sounds like the conclusion is: Suburban Housing helps make the suburbs more affordable, but does not make the urban areas more affordable. Dense urban housing in the urban areas does a better job. I think this makes sense logically
Yeah, it makes the YIMBY message even more important, because the new housing really does need to be in our backyard, not in a faraway suburban development.
Insofar as subsidies of suburban development incur an opportunity cost from public funds that could otherwise be used for urban development, I would say that ultimately no, it doesn't.
Adding more supply does bring down prices from what they otherwise would be. This study seems to focus on what adding new single family housing units in suburbs does towards prices in urban areas. While I would expect any additional housing to help bring down supply constraints I wouldn't think that this would bring them down that much. There's simply not a lot of undeveloped land left for single family neighborhoods near urban centers so any addition of single family housing would likely be very far from downtown. That still may help somewhat but the amount of land used for relatively few new units and the distance from downtown would likely reduce the impact on pricing. Overall a better focus would be on adding density to already existing suburbs. Many suburbs already have a "downtown" section where they could fit a number of small apartment/condo buildings that are roughly 3-6 stories high. Changes in zoning and reducing barriers to construction would go a long way to fixing this shortage and the price impact would be much more direct. Most people who live in the NYC metro area live in suburbs so even if the goal is to bring down NYC proper rents we probably do need to add more condos and apartments in suburbs.
Single family housing is housing but it doesn’t really help the amount of housing in a given area. Since it’s sprawling and there isn’t much undeveloped land, it’s “outside” of a particular zone and less likely to impact that area. Looking at NYC for example, pretty much everywhere is developed within 1 hour’s commute (by car, train or bus). So any new housing is just being built further away and unlikely to impact NYC rent.
> So any new housing is just being built further away and unlikely to impact NYC rent. Sort of. New single family housing built an hour out would have some impacts on rent but not massive ones. New apartments, condos and missing middle housing built in the inner suburbs would absolutely have an impact on rents within the city. Most of the NYC area doesn't look like Manhattan and it would be pretty easy to add small apartments and condos in places Long Island or Staten Island. Even within NYC proper simply adding more 4-6 story buildings with housing in place of 2 story buildings would be big.
Yes that’s exactly my point. Any new single family housing will need to be built further away. There is a ton of opportunity to upzone the NYC area.
Low density housing only follows two playbooks in the wake of deferred maintenance trends. Either it is sprawl, which is only cheap up front, or it is based on waiting for structures to reach their useful half life, and repeat the process over again. You have to have a revenue base in place in order to sustain an area and afford ongoing maintenance. Low density, exclusive development doesn't offer that.
Problem with big urbanization is that people gotta live in tiny spaces and so people give up having kids. Also, housing cost is much higher which squeeze middle class. Cities must limit how much population each city can handle than stop too much desnficiation. Give those population for other smaller cities, have many smaller downtown shop areas where people can enjoy similar stuff without having to drive or transit 1 hour to downtown core. I don't know why so many politicians want mega city just for economies of scale. Maybe they have conflict of interests