Gosh. You raised a can of worms there my friends. Did a short stint in the British housing ministry. Several issues, some which are unique to UK so ymmw.
Planning permission is a bugger. Age old town planning structures make it a pain to say no to and nimbyism is rife to create high density housing. It almost immediately reduces the value of the surrounding houses. See SF and it’s shit problem. Housing finance is a perpetual problem. Value of land versus value of housing on top is also a factor. Land acquisition is a very long drawn out affair and painful and expensive. Then there’s the issue of parking. Parking pricing is stupid. And the trade off between public transportation and high density housing private transportation sucks donkey legs. Finding good contiguous land is difficult. Converting brownfield land (like old factories or warehouses etc) to proper use is buttock clenchingly expensive and who pays for it? The liabilities emerge decades after the old owners have become bhoots We have to build up but commercial offices also need to be constructed. Finally, the government policies ranging from mortgage tax exemption to help to buy to different capital treatment for mortgages to presence of institutions like Fannie Mae and Mac all have buggered up the market something bad. Coupled with some countries where schools are funded from property taxes means you end up with even more weird incentives and trade offs. And people don’t want to live in affordable housing if it’s known as it is. Poor houses. And when they do, they get captured by the system. Council housing tenants in the UK don’t want to move exacerbating this labour mobility issue > On 28 Apr 2019, at 04:47, Shenoy N <[email protected]> wrote: > > One question I've always had is, Why is it so hard to have decent > affordable housing? > > To amplify. Technological progress has made virtually all essentials more > abundant, cheaper and better,such as food, clothes, vehicles, appliances, > air travel, everything. Curiously, housing in urban areas has simply grown > more expensive. This is clearly an anomaly and I have no idea why it is so. > The biggest culprit, everyone says, is land cost, because land is scarce. I > really don't think it's all THAT difficult to find land. Let us say we > wanted to house 1 crore people - 10 million - or about 50% of the metro > population in the Mumbai area. If you assume 200 sq ft per person, we'll > need about 200 sq km. The current density in slums, by the way, is about 20 > sq ft per person. > > How much of a strain is 200 km on the city? Well, the metro area is about > 4500 sq km. I don't think it would be very difficult to squeeze out 200 km > out of that . It's less than 5%. And it would house everybody. With labour > and material efficient building technology, even the cost should be less > than what developers incur, if you standardized things. And if you assume > the cost of construction to be Rs. 1000 per sq foot, the entire project > would be 200,000 crore rupees. That's not a large number at Indian Economy > scale. Plus, its an investment, not a hand out. > > Also, the fact that such housing developments will have to be far away from > the city center shouldn't be a deal breaker. There is enough mass transit > technology available. > > What might be the reasons why this isn't happening? > > > Thanks and regards > > Narendra Shenoy > > > >> On Sat, 27 Apr 2019 at 10:38, Pooja Sastry <[email protected]> wrote: >> >> Hello all! >> >> I would love to hear what the members of this list think of affordable >> housing - certainly from architects (hi Naresh!) and urban policymakers, >> but also everyone here. >> >> In my work as an urban planner, we throw around ideas like affordability as >> a function of land prices, minuscule floor areas, five times annual income, >> construction quality and technique - but these, for me, completely miss the >> mark. I'm a "millennial", renter, and likely never-homebuyer myself, and I >> don't think it should be a stretch to see housing as an essential, >> accessible (not to mention flexible and time-based) infrastructure instead >> of a luxury. >> >> Thoughts? >> >> Pooja >>
