The only way to solve this problem is to wrest control of local policy decisions away from municipal governments and make them instead at the state or national level. Unfortunately, I don't see that happening any time soon, since those already living in cities are much more incentivized to fight to retain the status quo than those who don't live there are incentivized to fight for changes that could hypothetically help them.

In a city known for wacky politicians, Scott Wiener was a breath of fresh air. He also signed the city's long term Subway plan[1].

0: https://artplusmarketing.com/housing-is-a-statewide-crisis-a...

1: http://connectsf.org/components/subway-vision/

Housing prices were remarkably consistent with all other prices for the 100 years before around 1998.

That is what the case in China, but the house price is still very high.

I agree it is people problem, but I did not see a way to solve it. A lot people want to make the house price affordable, but a lot do not. probably, greedy is human nature.

When I see people who constantly hold up urban high density housing development, in part to keep certain demographics from enjoying their neighborhoods, all the while enjoying the protection of limited property tax increases due to Prop 13 while still reaping the rewards of housing appreciation, I can make a case for myself that these people are being greedy and unethical.

On the other hand, if someone works hard, saves for years to make a down payment on a mortgage, services the debt of that mortgage for 20-30 years, and relies on their house as their primary investment, I can't really blame them for voting for policies that increase housing prices. I think this highlights why the issue will be so hard to solve. It's going to be very difficult to get people who have been paying into a mortgage under the assumption that housing is a safe investment to suddenly support policies that will result in real estate depreciation.

I was having a thought the other day that, were I a developer, and could afford to, what would I do with a five-story building? Ground floor commercial, top floor market rate (or above?) and then floors 1-4 a percentage below market rate with maybe a set increase for each year. I guess it would work as long as I factor in paying back to the bank and making a certain profit (but not the max). I don't know, I'm not a developer, I don't even know how one becomes one without already having money to do so, but in my AEC office design decisions are one thing but at the end of the day it is 1) building as cheaply as possible while 2) maximizing profit per square foot.

In the past, incorperated townships were created for specific goals: we have a coal mine here, create a township around it. Today, that kind of top-down leadership is no longer used so widely.

California could carve out a new township, and use its state budget to incentivize the development of an urban region with cheap housing, high tech jobs, and interesting culture. They do not do so out of choice, not out of inability.

Also, the problem with housing costs is that land is finite and expensive, hence the need for vertical growth and smaller units to add to the supply.

Finally, another problem is the influential, nativist NIMBY homeowners whom styme affordable housing efforts like vertical growth and microhomes to keep their property values high, while millions sleep rough on the street. The disenfranchised will stay screwed until they organize and demand minimal human decency.

In the USA, the average house size has grown. So has its quality. It has air conditioning standard in warm climates. It has safer electrical systems that handle higher loads. It has more carpeting. More bathrooms. Better appliances, with washers and dryers standard. More, bigger windows. Higher ceilings in basements. Lower-maintenance building envelopes. Better fire safety, with fire sprinklers being required in many jurisdictions. Off-street parking. The list goes on and on.

Technology helps explain why housing has improved so much. Much of the home is fabricated offsite and trucked in. Computers help make more efficient use of materials. Manufactured building products (like oriented strand board) make more efficient use of lumber, and create more durable products. The labor savings are immense: compare the labor to sweat a house of copper pipes versus using pex. Compare plastering a house versus drywall. Not even in the same league cost wise.

Do not make the mistake of looking at a few extraordinarily high cost areas like SF or NYC and believe they represent anything typical. They do not. Housing has improved dramatically in just a few decades.

Housing price is Land + Building Cost + Profit with Supply and Demand. Land is politics which you cant improve much, Supply and Demand is a market force you cant change. So really the only thing you can do is Building Cost.

But what i think the housing mentioned here being better really are houses, not Flat. i.e High Rise Building. And all of those Appliances has nothing to do with building itself.

What i really want to see, is technology improving High Rise Building in Cites, so when the time for land approval comes, it could be built and sold ( live in ) within 6 months. Preferably even sooner.

They should be durable, easy to assemble, easy to fit in floors, Windows ( Without leaking water ), Pipes, etc.

I have seen Office Building being built in that time frame but not residential. In Hong Kong it is common to see these Office building built in Metal / Steel frame compared to Residential being concrete only. I guess that is a cost issues involved.

At the moment, fitting pipes, Windows, and polishing etc after the block of concrete lay on each floor is still very labour intensive and slow. To me, technology hasn't improved at all in these regards.

I mean, look at the Midwest. Houses there cost nothing compared to houses in metro areas along the coast. It's not like cities there are terribly middling either. You look at the Cleveland Metro, and it has 3.2 million people, it has a lot of historical architecture, it has good infrastructure, it's alright overall.

But everyone wants to live in LA, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, Denver, New York, Miami, or pretty much any other major city along our nation's western or eastern coasts (not so much the southern coast, unless you like living in a greenhouse in the summer).

I mean, I get it, all the cool stuff is happening elsewhere, but Midwesterners are still having a good time, sans beach.

In case you're wondering, I myself live in New Mexico in a place called Albuquerque. Affordable, but not as affordable as some Midwestern cities. Because the city wasn't in the Rust Belt there's also fewer older structures. The boom took place once all the nuclear scientists moved in and gas was cheap, so it's pretty badly sprawled out.

I moved from Chicago to the Bay Area and while I'm not a developer, the opportunities are still night and day in terms of the job options, the pay, benefits, etc.

A cheap mortgage on a nice house in a good neighborhood means squat if there are not a lot of job options, or only ones a long commute away.

Personally I think the best thing to help this is make remote work more viable for non developer professions that don't have as much demand or leverage. This would enable more people to live in affordable areas if getting another remote job were comparable to living in a market flush with jobs.

So maybe the right answer to ask is not how to create more affordable and attractive housing, but rather how to spread the jobs out to cities overlooked by employers.

Why isn't there a satellite Google office in Cincinnati, in other words?

First thing that comes to mind: I like (mostly non-mainstream) music and I like to go to live music events. There's no way I can do that frequently in a rural area. Well, apart from driving to the next larger city, that is.

Which brings me to the next point: While public transport in larger cities often is far from perfect it's ok to pretty decent most of the time. Living in a rural area requires owning a car, something which I've given up on years ago and never intend to do again.

Then there's the economic aspect of cities: Where there's a greater density of people and companies there also is more potential income available. Cities allow you to make new connections on a regular basis. Meeting new people allows you to explore new opportunities - economic or otherwise - if only by serendipity.

Apart from that, large cities counterintuitively also make sense ecologically because they require less resources than if the some number of human beings lived spread out through the country.

I personally consider every time I get in the car to be a failure on my part that I regret. It takes some planning, but I get around mostly by walking, biking, and taking advantage of our regional bus system (which admittedly does not come very often). Other friends of mine commute by cross country skiing or by rowing when the weather makes it conducive.

There is a lot of great music in rural areas, especially live music. It helps if you develop an appreciation for fiddle music and sad songs about logging camps, the love that you lost, and really good dogs. Admittedly these may be acquired tastes.

Having close contacts in urban areas certainly helps on the income front, and I will admit is that a minimum of a three hour drive to the nearest major airport makes jetting off to speak or consult challenging.

I am definitely going to look into the ecological balance, because I that is something I cannot speak to. A lot of my neighbors have solar panels and are off the grid, but you could be right about that.

I'm 25, I'm a dev, I'm single, I like spending time with people. I like to plan far ahead.

In cities, I can command a far higher pay more easily--- getting over $100k is the norm. This is important to me, because I like having excess money to buy stocks for years to come. If I wanted to live in the Montana outback, it may be difficult for me to find a company willing to pay at that level. The options would be far more limited. It would be "take what you can get," and take what they offer. But the truth is, there's not many companies hiring devs in the Montana outback.

I don't like working remotely because I'm not personally comfortable with it-- I often need to ask more tenured devs a lot of questions about legacy code and I like to be there in person to do it. So that isn't an option I'm interested in.

I like to have things to do after work-- rock gyms, parks, classes, shows, movies, events, martial arts, or just wandering around various city districts. In the outback, this isn't an option. In small towns you have the outdoors, but you'll often have to drive 40 minutes to get groceries (Source: I'm currently on a farm in a town you've never heard of in the middle of Virginia.)

There is not a plentitude of people in their 20s available to spend time with or meet in rural settings. There are no meetups, there are no clubs, there are no rock gyms. The social groups are often more targeted towards 40+ groups, because that's who lives out there. I personally don't think it's likely I would make many new friends or find many people to date in a rural setting.

In the city, I can get paid what I want, I can meet new people and try new things every day, I have hundreds or thousands of restaurants to choose from (I like eating out!), I have many stores nearby for buying all variety of goods, I can go to a beautiful park like Central Park and enjoy it and maybe meet people there. I can sign up for classes in almost anything.

From where I'm sitting, it's hard to see why someone in my position wouldn't want to live in a city. Sure, once you're settled and no longer feel a need for these things, I understand it perfectly. But when you're in your early 20s? Seems the clear choice.

You make a good some good points about clubs and proximity to groups of 20 somethings though, those are certainly in short supply where I am.

Different locations are attractive at different stages in life, so I'm glad your are enjoying your 20s. I spent my 20s working around the world in Europe, Asia, and Africa, and I have never regretted a single minute of that time. At this point in my life I'm very happy to have a general store, a brew pub, a French restaurant, and my office within an easy ski or walk of where I live.

Much of this land comes with subsidies and titles. Immense amounts of money can be made from grouse shooting. There's not really an incentive to sell land. There also tends to be a stigma in selling off inherited land -- like the end of a dynasty. Much of the land that is bought by developers is land that was sold by developers.

When land is sold from these families, it is sold for very high amounts because demand is high and supply is low. Land can make up ~50% of a new house price. I do not know if there is any collusion amongst those who do own the land, but any such collusion would bring enormous advantages and would almost certainly not be condemned in any way.

Affordable housing in the UK is a needlessly scarce resource. Instead of focusing on supply, which would lead to a long-term solution, much of the media has jumped through hoops to focus on the short-term demand caused by immigration whilst ignoring the slightly peculiar policy to sell off state-owned affordable housing to banks.

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[1] Land ownership in England and Wales is interesting -- the Crown owns all the land, and landowners buy a title to the land. Scotland is different again and a greater proportion of land is in the hands of a smaller proportion of the population.

A) The 'cost of housing' is usually not the building itself. It's the land. So, we can't compare to other products.

B) It's greatly affected by financing, interest rates, accepted norms. Ex: when interest rates drop, housing prices balloon. Also - as people accept longer and longer mortgages, housing prices ballon.

C) It's a relative thing, not a 'cost' thing. There are x number of people and say, roughly x spots for housing. The riches people will live where they want. The others go elsewhere. If rich people want to live in an urban area, there is nary a solution for 'low cost' housing in that area.

Some things like 'rent control' - if applied responsibly can maybe help, but they can also create other weird problems.

Social housing might help, but also, some other odd problems.

The only want to allow poor people to live in expensive areas is to seriously mess with market forces, and that can be problematic.

The 'problem' we are trying to address here is age old: 'the fair and equitable distribution of resources'. It's not going to be solved with some new technology or process :), it will probably be some smart economic thinking.

Using New York City as an example there are about 3.4 million residential housing units available and a population that is set to reach 9 million in the next few years (500k increase).

It's true that there is not much raw land left for new development, but the city can change zoning in areas. Imagine if 100,000 1 family houses are rezoned to allow for even just 8 unit multi-family walkup. 800,000 new housing units would help counter the demand that causes the price to keep rising.

The home construction industry also has issues which end raising the finished cost of housing. An interesting read is "Sweat Equity" by Larry Angell, A self-published book where the author describes why it made financial sense for him to leave his job for a year to build his own house rather than buy a house and continue working.

If you look at a satellite view of the city, there are nodes of density with massive amounts of individual house spaces. But it's expensive all over. I don't think there's any real solution to that outside of another real estate collapse here (which only set things back for a few years and stopped some gentrification creep).

"Will we ever have affordable and attractive urban housing for all?". No, not as thing stand. Those with a monopoly on credit will continue to use competition for accommodation as a means to leach every spare drop of wealth from the productive members of society.

Realistically we either need a massive borderline miraculous leap forward in materials science and construction technology (like carbon nanofiber weaving spider drones) or a completely different system from capitalism for allocating for basic needs, or a looooot less people. Its not really a space problem at all so much as a energy cost and societal values one.

The cost of making the building is not the issues.

It's the property price that is the issue, always.

    It's the property price that is the issue

It would prevent speculative ownership of land and encourage development of underused land in high-value areas. It would also capture a lot of the value of urban development, so that the urban area gets the money rather than private owners who simply got lucky enough to buy the property.

It's not just about the raw materials. It's also about labor, safety, regulations (many of which are there for good reasons like preventing people from dying in fires due to cheap construction or lack of escape routes).

Even the cost of trucking in the materials and paying for parking tickets/getting permits to inconvenience the neighbors for months on end can be a major expense.

Even if that were a goal, you couldn't reach it because there is only so much space. This would be a problem even, if we were to use what space is available, which is usually not the case for political reasons.

Improved technology won't help you and even changing politics wouldn't get you to this.

Small town folk are of average intelligence, with a lower concentration of significantly smarter people simply due to the fact that high paying jobs are concentrated in urban areas.

If you were to concentrate high paying jobs in small towns, you'd see the reverse happening.

As for being closed minded---I'd find that people from urban areas are more close minded if they happen to live in their enclave without much interaction outside of it. Many people in cities are highly mobile, but many people in cities just treat their neighborhood as a walled garden, and are highly defensive against other types of people.

https://pumpkinperson.com/2016/02/11/the-incredible-correlat...

Niche activities cannot flourish or even exist if there isn't a sufficient "critical mass" of people interested in that niche, so a small town simply can not have as much diversity in such niches as a large city.

Also, Americans have been sold on the idea of real estate as an investment and I'm not sure how we will ever get policies that lead to lower housing prices when that essentially means that a large part of the population will have to agree to enact policies that will result in depreciation of their primary asset.

It's a people problem, not a technology one - the elevator was already invented.

"The Rent Is Too Damn High" is a good, short book on this.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capsule_hotel

By the way, someone really ought to define what they mean when they discuss affordable things. It seems everyone has a different idea of what that means.

I pay about 25% of the cost of a 1 bedroom apartment in SFO for a 4 bedroom house with a great yards, with a 15 year mortgage.

Any gap in salary for not living in SFO/NYC/BOS is more than accounted for. In my case, over my lifetime I'll come out $4M ahead.

You won't be working for a hit new startup.

The main issues I see are:

Construction is a low skill labor intensive source of jobs, so unions and government don't want to cut it. And a more efficient way of building will probably mean less people working.

Most people loves being showing off, a huge house is the best way of showing how much money and power you have. Why print this wall when you could buy some expensive material?

We need to solve that problem first. Sadly, I don't have a solution.