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.
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.