I stayed in Guangzhou and was struck by how differently they'd handled housing compared to London or SF. Basically there were a lot of approx 35 story similar tower blocks and most people used public transport/taxis rather than having cars. There's really no reason why London/SF couldn't do that apart from government policy. I live in London and like it but wonder if having all the property being some silly multiple of wages is the best way to do things.
You'd want to put them in kind of nondescript areas to avoid taking out the historic stuff as mentioned in the article and maybe pay out 50% above market to existing buildings in the way so they are not too pissed off but it could be doable.
> You'd want to put them in kind of nondescript areas to avoid taking out the historic stuff as mentioned in the article
It’s amusing to suggest there is “historic stuff” in SF, as there is in China. I saw a “historic” building with a plaque in Palo Alto. It was constructed in the 1900s! Like, after my grandfather was born.
Historical preservation is stealing from the future. If I had my druthers, the opportunity cost of designating buildings or areas as historic would come directly out of the pockets of the preservationists.
> There's really no reason why London/SF couldn't do that apart from government policy. I live in London and like it but wonder if having all the property being some silly multiple of wages is the best way to do things.
But Guangzhou has a much higher property price to income ratio than either London or SF. So, the policy you suggest doesn't fix the problem you raise.
There's really no reason why London/SF couldn't do that apart from government policy.
Well, that "government policy" is the will of the taxpayers and voters who want to decide what happens to the city they live in and not just accept that living conditions imposed upon them by some bureaucrat. People in Guangzhou may be accustomed to living in Sim City, but that's not how it works in a democracy.
Personally, I've been to all three cities, and I wouldn't want to live in Guangzhou, compared to London or San Francisco.
> You'd want to put them in kind of nondescript areas to avoid taking out the historic stuff as mentioned in the article and maybe pay out 50% above market to existing buildings in the way so they are not too pissed off but it could be doable.
Already exists, see e.g. Croydon. Yes, not in Zone 1, but 14 minutes to London Bridge by Thameslink, about the same time it took me to go from South Kensington to Westminster/St James in the early 2000s and probably without having to wait out a couple trains at rush hour due to lack of space within.
> You'd want to put them in kind of nondescript areas to avoid taking out the historic stuff as mentioned in the article and maybe pay out 50% above market to existing buildings in the way so they are not too pissed off but it could be doable.
And, presumably, they'd be as cheap as possible, leading to higher probability of hazards like at Grenfell Tower?
Moscow did a very similar thing in 1990s and 2000s, allowing to build huge swathes of 25-32 story buildings. It allowed for quite accessible mortgages, with the cost of the buildings being moderate.
It did allow for significant growth. It also put a lot of strain on public transportation.
It isn't a simple matter of "paying people" to get them out of their homes. You have to force them out via eminent domain. And not only that, rewrite your laws to extend the powers of eminent domain well beyond their current scope -- which in most jurisdictions almost certainly do not cover the scale of forced redevelopment and mass evictions you are imagining.
You'd want to put them in kind of nondescript areas
These neighborhoods aren't "nondescript" to people who have been living there for generations. And your apparent obliviousness to this central fact goes to the heart of the matter of why redevelopment politics are so contentious in many cities.
To make these liveable, you have to have very strong central planning. Many former/currently communist cities look like this with varying height.
In Moscow for example, new apartments tend to be 25-40 stories high. However, they have large offsets from the street, are not built “shoulder to shoulder” with neighbors and generally developments from inner courtyards that are big enough to have parking and a soccer field.
There’s also a phenomenon of what locals call “pinpoint development”, where some unscrupulous developer will try to stick a tower in these courtyards and ruin the setup for everyone.
Contrast that with SF or NYC - you hardly have open plots of lands and everything is one giant wall of buildings.
Well, London and SF are historic and beautiful cities (at least architecturally). Part of the reason people WANT to live there is because they aren't full of skyscrapers and megacorporations.
In fact, one of the defining traits of San Francisco is that it disallows chain restaurants, walmarts, etc. It also has many parks. When I see a stone church that has stood for 200 years in a city, I think it's priceless.
If you don't, well there's plenty of cities that don't give a crap about aesthetics at all, and so they're cheap, and so they're full of poor people, and so they're full of crime.
try to build in San Francisco, just try. The latest attempt was shot down because it would have shadow encroach eighteen percent of a city park, not even where kids congregate as its a two acre park next to a school [1]. This was after getting past every previous hurdle. As in, when anyone can block a private project nothing gets done. Oh you can try to put one up but you have to buy everyone off or so handicap your project it cannot be affordably built. Another horror story is the ever ongoing saga to build apartments by a laundromat owner [2]
America's housing project is simply because of government and the courts. Politicians through special interest groups which funnel money to their campaign and friends; namely highly paid positions with little more than a part time job, to courts which treat every opposing idea as having merit.
I completely agree that those areas should allow more 5-10 story buildings, but let's not kid ourselves about what they would look like. They would be One-Plus-Fives [1].
Why would real estate owners acting in their own self interest want that ? The funny thing I notice is that the left rhetoric evaporates as soon is it has a chance to affect valuation of persons own assets.
False comparison to SF. Build dense highrises in the middle of nowhere of course make the rent cheap. The dense highrises in the middle of Shanghai would have outrageous rent. Desirable places are always expensive.
It isn't just supply though, but essentially inequality. Chinese cities have completely different demographics than western cities. If you want to live somewhere popular in China rents, and real estate values, are rapidly increasing.
Housing isn't like manufactured goods where the marginal cost decrease the more you make. Since the more you build in one area the less available space there is. If you want to decrease cost you have to supply more space.
Still that is only the supply side. As long as there are people, or even an increase of people, that are willing to pay it never becomes affordable even if there are comparable.
Of course housing is subject to the iron law of supply and demand. It's remarkable that so many people find seemingly-reasonable justifications for denying it.
There must be a name for this pattern, which occurs in areas of life as varied as technical debates, climate science, and health. The common thread is that there's some strong effect that smart people would prefer not to be true and that these smart people spend an inordinate amount of time and social capital finding seemingly-rational justifications for denying this strong effect. The result of this high-IQ motivated reasoning is an impenetrable mess of dueling blog posts, cherry-picked studies, and sophisticated personal sniping that leads regular people to throw their hands up in confusion and do nothing.
An example of this effect: the "zombie claim" (an idea that keeps circulating after being debunked, mostly because it's rhetorically useful) that building housing doesn't decrease prices because developers build only high-end housing. Granted, this effect might be true for very limited times under very limited circumstances in some special region of the supply curve, but it's clearly not a general principle. But there are just enough studies purporting to show this effect that people who want to block housing in general can point to some official-looking LaTeX-typeset thing and say "Look! Economics proves that construction doesn't lower prices!". By the time someone gets around to reading that article and commenting, "if you read beyond the abstract, the article it doesn't say that...", someone's already made some other blog post with the same discredited idea. It goes on and on and on and on and on.
I've become increasingly convinced that the whole scientific and rational enterprise only works in collaborative mode, when there's some shared desire to find the truth. You can never convince someone of something by using reason and evidence, and your counterparty will suspect (rightfully so!) that your "evidence" is just the sort of rhetoric-disguised-as-dialectic that I'm talking about.
> You can never convince someone of something by using reason and evidence, and your counterparty will suspect (rightfully so!) that your "evidence" is just the sort of rhetoric-disguised-as-dialectic that I'm talking about.
I personally agreed with your general idea, but the place where we are today was developed intentionally via propaganda systems designed to question the validity of expertise. If a person believes that government bureaucrats are all ineffective, that vaccines are dangerous, that all scientists believed a new ice age was going to start back in the 80's, then it is very easy to deny anything that experts say, and that your gut is right most of the time. This, of course, couldn't be further from the truth.
There are huge swaths of humanity that are willing to change their opinions based on the presentation of evidence. What is clear is that they are not good at generating enough political power to start the grand collective ideas that are necessary to fight homelessness locally (I know that I'm having trouble pushing housing first ideas - I think that Americans are punitive, culturally), or to fight climate change globally.
I think that kind of breathing room is also important for fostering entrepreneurship. I moved to China from Hong Kong, you do have some people bumming around but you also have some pretty bright people who quit their jobs to really grind and work on a business idea. I can't imagine doing that in hk, pretty soon your just priced out of soaring rent and cost of living
Some times I feel that HN is a real estate forum. People, why are you so crazed about housing? :)
I have following thing to say about real estate in China as a person who's been going in and out of China for last 12 years: conventional supply and demand economics fail to rationally explain the market, alike many other things in the country.
There are big cities with really constrained supply, not unlike California, and still having low rents, and there is Shanghai, with new suburbs and microdistricts popping up every year, but still having highest rent in China despite high vacancy rate even in the city centre.
Housing in China is also a very emotionally charged topic. A lot of status connotation is attached to it, and there is peer pressure like "no wife for you without a house."
Most Chinese I meet can't conceal their bemusement when they see foreigners being so unconcerned with housing issue. These people don't know that in most of the world, renting an apartment, and moreover luxury one, is more expensive than paying for mortgage, and are utterly shocked when I show them the digits. Chinese don't realise just how blessed they are with low rents.
And yes, there are still Chinese out there who are shocked discovering that "most Americans are still living in wooden houses," and that ones who live there tend to be richer than ones buying highrise apartments.
Beijing isn’t as hot as Shanghai real estate wise, but I could never get my head around how an apartment that would sell for a million dollars would rent out for just 10k RMB/month. Why would anyone even bother buying with such lousy rent to sale ratios?
Anyways, I saved a lot on rent during my 9 years in China.
> most Americans are still living in wooden houses
that is pretty much an American thing, e.g. in Sydney, people don't buy wooden match boxes, they prefer double brick federation home or californian bungalow.
Using Chongqing as example is kinda cheeky, it's a west side big city, but a rare one in which speculators haven't found the runaway success seen in other ones.
Just want to shime in and recommend you to visit Chongqing. Incredibly interesting city to explore, great food and still has some rural China vibe that the other first tier cities start to lack.
Are there any countries that do this and don't have really scary censorship and speech policies? I'd definitely want to live somewhere like that. It wouldn't be hard to end up financially independent in a place like that on a SWE salary.
Isn't this simple supply and demand? The housing price is too high? Build more houses or apartments. Yet San Francisco authorities tried every possible way to suppress supply: rent control and all kinds of regulations, to say the least. So much for so called "we fight for poor people".
I wonder how the traffic is like in these large Chinese cities. In India, esp Bangalore traffic and the crowding in the streets has grown up astronomically, and the road system can barely handle it.
"Basically there were a lot of approx 35 story similar tower blocks and most people used public transport/taxis rather than having cars."
My understanding is that traffic does increase until a certain threshold of density is achieved and then it craters from there. Cities should probably be designed just above that.
The result of Chinese population control is a significantly higher number of men than women. I'd personally rather pay more rent than live somewhere like that.
[+] [-] tim333|7 years ago|reply
This kind of stuff https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/article/1761639...
You'd want to put them in kind of nondescript areas to avoid taking out the historic stuff as mentioned in the article and maybe pay out 50% above market to existing buildings in the way so they are not too pissed off but it could be doable.
[+] [-] rayiner|7 years ago|reply
It’s amusing to suggest there is “historic stuff” in SF, as there is in China. I saw a “historic” building with a plaque in Palo Alto. It was constructed in the 1900s! Like, after my grandfather was born.
Historical preservation is stealing from the future. If I had my druthers, the opportunity cost of designating buildings or areas as historic would come directly out of the pockets of the preservationists.
[+] [-] dragonwriter|7 years ago|reply
But Guangzhou has a much higher property price to income ratio than either London or SF. So, the policy you suggest doesn't fix the problem you raise.
https://www.numbeo.com/property-investment/in/Guangzhou
https://www.numbeo.com/property-investment/in/San-Francisco
https://www.numbeo.com/property-investment/in/London
[+] [-] reaperducer|7 years ago|reply
Well, that "government policy" is the will of the taxpayers and voters who want to decide what happens to the city they live in and not just accept that living conditions imposed upon them by some bureaucrat. People in Guangzhou may be accustomed to living in Sim City, but that's not how it works in a democracy.
Personally, I've been to all three cities, and I wouldn't want to live in Guangzhou, compared to London or San Francisco.
People aren't robots to be warehoused.
[+] [-] crdb|7 years ago|reply
Already exists, see e.g. Croydon. Yes, not in Zone 1, but 14 minutes to London Bridge by Thameslink, about the same time it took me to go from South Kensington to Westminster/St James in the early 2000s and probably without having to wait out a couple trains at rush hour due to lack of space within.
[+] [-] lazyjones|7 years ago|reply
And, presumably, they'd be as cheap as possible, leading to higher probability of hazards like at Grenfell Tower?
[+] [-] nine_k|7 years ago|reply
It did allow for significant growth. It also put a lot of strain on public transportation.
[+] [-] drugme|7 years ago|reply
You'd want to put them in kind of nondescript areas
These neighborhoods aren't "nondescript" to people who have been living there for generations. And your apparent obliviousness to this central fact goes to the heart of the matter of why redevelopment politics are so contentious in many cities.
[+] [-] didibus|7 years ago|reply
You mean like the Projects?
I feel like that's been done before and failed.
[+] [-] sologoub|7 years ago|reply
In Moscow for example, new apartments tend to be 25-40 stories high. However, they have large offsets from the street, are not built “shoulder to shoulder” with neighbors and generally developments from inner courtyards that are big enough to have parking and a soccer field.
There’s also a phenomenon of what locals call “pinpoint development”, where some unscrupulous developer will try to stick a tower in these courtyards and ruin the setup for everyone.
Contrast that with SF or NYC - you hardly have open plots of lands and everything is one giant wall of buildings.
[+] [-] microcolonel|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mr_toad|7 years ago|reply
If England is like New Zealand guess it’s close to 100%
[+] [-] branchless|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] madengr|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alexandercrohde|7 years ago|reply
In fact, one of the defining traits of San Francisco is that it disallows chain restaurants, walmarts, etc. It also has many parks. When I see a stone church that has stood for 200 years in a city, I think it's priceless.
If you don't, well there's plenty of cities that don't give a crap about aesthetics at all, and so they're cheap, and so they're full of poor people, and so they're full of crime.
[+] [-] baron816|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Shivetya|7 years ago|reply
America's housing project is simply because of government and the courts. Politicians through special interest groups which funnel money to their campaign and friends; namely highly paid positions with little more than a part time job, to courts which treat every opposing idea as having merit.
[1] https://www.sfchronicle.com/politics/article/SF-supervisors-...
[2] https://reason.com/2019/03/19/the-most-contested-apartment-b
[+] [-] jetrink|7 years ago|reply
1. http://archplanbaltimore.blogspot.com/2015/03/how-one-plus-f...
[+] [-] rb808|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pg_is_a_butt|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] lquist|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hackeraccount|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TomMarius|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] qaq|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ww520|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] njepa|7 years ago|reply
Housing isn't like manufactured goods where the marginal cost decrease the more you make. Since the more you build in one area the less available space there is. If you want to decrease cost you have to supply more space.
Still that is only the supply side. As long as there are people, or even an increase of people, that are willing to pay it never becomes affordable even if there are comparable.
[+] [-] quotemstr|7 years ago|reply
There must be a name for this pattern, which occurs in areas of life as varied as technical debates, climate science, and health. The common thread is that there's some strong effect that smart people would prefer not to be true and that these smart people spend an inordinate amount of time and social capital finding seemingly-rational justifications for denying this strong effect. The result of this high-IQ motivated reasoning is an impenetrable mess of dueling blog posts, cherry-picked studies, and sophisticated personal sniping that leads regular people to throw their hands up in confusion and do nothing.
An example of this effect: the "zombie claim" (an idea that keeps circulating after being debunked, mostly because it's rhetorically useful) that building housing doesn't decrease prices because developers build only high-end housing. Granted, this effect might be true for very limited times under very limited circumstances in some special region of the supply curve, but it's clearly not a general principle. But there are just enough studies purporting to show this effect that people who want to block housing in general can point to some official-looking LaTeX-typeset thing and say "Look! Economics proves that construction doesn't lower prices!". By the time someone gets around to reading that article and commenting, "if you read beyond the abstract, the article it doesn't say that...", someone's already made some other blog post with the same discredited idea. It goes on and on and on and on and on.
I've become increasingly convinced that the whole scientific and rational enterprise only works in collaborative mode, when there's some shared desire to find the truth. You can never convince someone of something by using reason and evidence, and your counterparty will suspect (rightfully so!) that your "evidence" is just the sort of rhetoric-disguised-as-dialectic that I'm talking about.
It's a dismal conclusion.
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] moosey|7 years ago|reply
I personally agreed with your general idea, but the place where we are today was developed intentionally via propaganda systems designed to question the validity of expertise. If a person believes that government bureaucrats are all ineffective, that vaccines are dangerous, that all scientists believed a new ice age was going to start back in the 80's, then it is very easy to deny anything that experts say, and that your gut is right most of the time. This, of course, couldn't be further from the truth.
There are huge swaths of humanity that are willing to change their opinions based on the presentation of evidence. What is clear is that they are not good at generating enough political power to start the grand collective ideas that are necessary to fight homelessness locally (I know that I'm having trouble pushing housing first ideas - I think that Americans are punitive, culturally), or to fight climate change globally.
Still a dismal conclusion.
[+] [-] ackbar03|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] baybal2|7 years ago|reply
I have following thing to say about real estate in China as a person who's been going in and out of China for last 12 years: conventional supply and demand economics fail to rationally explain the market, alike many other things in the country.
There are big cities with really constrained supply, not unlike California, and still having low rents, and there is Shanghai, with new suburbs and microdistricts popping up every year, but still having highest rent in China despite high vacancy rate even in the city centre.
Housing in China is also a very emotionally charged topic. A lot of status connotation is attached to it, and there is peer pressure like "no wife for you without a house."
Most Chinese I meet can't conceal their bemusement when they see foreigners being so unconcerned with housing issue. These people don't know that in most of the world, renting an apartment, and moreover luxury one, is more expensive than paying for mortgage, and are utterly shocked when I show them the digits. Chinese don't realise just how blessed they are with low rents.
And yes, there are still Chinese out there who are shocked discovering that "most Americans are still living in wooden houses," and that ones who live there tend to be richer than ones buying highrise apartments.
[+] [-] seanmcdirmid|7 years ago|reply
Anyways, I saved a lot on rent during my 9 years in China.
[+] [-] dis-sys|7 years ago|reply
that is pretty much an American thing, e.g. in Sydney, people don't buy wooden match boxes, they prefer double brick federation home or californian bungalow.
[+] [-] mcguire|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mixmastamyk|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sampo|7 years ago|reply
This is true for SF Bay Area as well.
[+] [-] bearjaws|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mcguire|7 years ago|reply
Apartment (1 bedroom) in City Centre 307.91 $[1]
Average Monthly Net Salary (After Tax) 825.35 $[1]
37%
San Francisco:
Apartment (1 bedroom) in City Centre 3,386.72 $[2]
Average Monthly Net Salary (After Tax) 6,497.75
52%
Oklahoma City:
Apartment (1 bedroom) in City Centre 857.50 $[3]
Average Monthly Net Salary (After Tax) 2,639.56 $[3]
32%
[1] https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/in/Chongqing?displayCu...
[2] https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/in/San-Francisco
[3] https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/in/Oklahoma-City
[+] [-] foota|7 years ago|reply
Of course it's cheaper to house people when land isn't scarce.
[+] [-] AFascistWorld|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] klrr|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] swiley|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] g9yuayon|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] billfruit|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mixmastamyk|7 years ago|reply
"Basically there were a lot of approx 35 story similar tower blocks and most people used public transport/taxis rather than having cars."
My understanding is that traffic does increase until a certain threshold of density is achieved and then it craters from there. Cities should probably be designed just above that.
[+] [-] redm|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Canada|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] LoSboccacc|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] swiley|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Proven|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]