There seems to be a general lack of political will for big projects in the west.
Looking at Asia now is like what the west used to be like.
I am unsure about the cause but I suspect that a lot of it is that people seem a lot more worried about consultation with locals and such.
In the past the government might just decide “we are building a highway here” or “we are building all this infrastructure for houses there” and there seemed to be a lot less consideration for how people affected would feel about it.
Media has gotten more pervasive, so we might imagine that politicians are more concerned about things flaring up there, but Asia has plenty of media access too, so that doesn’t really explain it.
> There seems to be a general lack of political will for big projects in the west.
We don't need big projects. If popular US cities like Seattle and San Francisco simply allowed people to build 5-story apartment buildings in all the space that's currently set aside for single-family detached homes, you'd see people building millions of small projects to easily meet the demand.
The difference is that the Bay Area apartments would be new initially vacant apartments that could compete with existing apartments.
New York already has had high density for a century+, but has not been adding apartments at a rate that would match population growth (and income growth) for decades.
In the Bay example, presumably if the new apartments were a one off, prices would initially come down, but would then start to rise again as more people move in and add to demand.
The solution would be to continuously add sufficient new apartments to match population growth (which could be done by liberally allowing builders to build more density to meet demand).
Which is roughly "new units decrease price if there's excess demand". Which is the classic microeconomics theory of how the price point shifts due as the increased supply sets a new equilibrium.
And also the city would turn into a horrible place to live with tons of pollution and congestion. Similar to large Asian cities where you can barely breathe, the noise is unbearable and it's a mission to get from one part of the city to another.
Nevermind issues like "can our sewage pipes handle it?".
Paris is definitely not a place where you can point to an example of abundant, affordable housing. Are you kidding me? Adjusted for wages, Paris purchase prices are more unaffordable than London or New York.
I moved to Paris to start a new job recently, and the housing situation sucks so much.
The prices in Paris are fairly high, 1000€ for a 30m² flat. But that's the relatively small heart of "Paris intra muros", excluding the "banlieues" (suburbs) which are cheaper and 30 minutes to an hour with the Métro (or the RER). That doesn't sound more unaffordable than London, not on a tech salary and colleagues have told me co-habitation is not a thing here (whereas most of my friends and colleagues in London lived in shared flats, for example).
What makes Paris impossible to rent in, is the absolutely insane demand for housing that frees real estate agents to do whatever the fuck they please. I spent three weeks calling every day, multiple agencies, only to be told by each and every one of them that they wouldn't let to me because I am a salaried worker in a trial period ("salarié en periode d' essaie", a three-month trial period mandated by French law). Even with my company offering to be my guarantor (which means they would shoulder all the risk of rent arrears) they would not let to me. Not one. My contacts list is still full of numbers of "immobiliers" (real estate agencies), I know 80% of the agencies and I have masochistic fun pointing them out when I pass outside them with friends. Not one of them would let to me. Not. One!
That's without all the absolutely insane amount of documentation they require (three months of recent rent receipts, proof of having paid taxes in France in the last year, etc) which you won't have if you haven't already lived and worked in France for a while, and the complete bollocks demand of earning three times the rent in salary, and being able to afford two times the rent in advance (as a guarantee; we'll see if I get mine back). But I think that's all par for the course in big cities.
In the end I was only able to find an apartment because an estate agent who's friends with my boss did me a favor. And even he wouldn't talk to me until I barged into his office. So I got 15 m² with a 3m² bathroom with no sink (there's a 5lt washing machine in its place) and a "kitchen corner" that's barely enough to make breakfast cereals, all for the price of 720€.
For the record, I'm an EU citizen and I have a doctorate in a tech subject. My French colleagues have shared similar rental horror stories. I have no idea how people manage who are worse off financially, or come from outside the EU.
tl;dr: no, you don't want the housing situation in your city to be like that in Paris.
I feel your pain. And you still don't realize the worst part: things are going to get far far worse thanks to the new laws regarding energy "performance".
Basically, laws now mandate every flat to have good thermal isolation, otherwise you can't rent them.
Which means approx 30% of the housing in Paris will be banned from the renting market in the next 3 years. It started this very year.
PS: and because we're french, the diagnostic for "energy performance" of a housing is full of boggus formula which overestimate the consumption of your flat by a factor of 3 ( at least).
Thanks. Well, I didn't know that. I had thought, when I finally moved here, that the French would have free energy on demand like in Star Trek, what with all the nuclear stations. I guess not.
I like the French. It's true there's mad amounts of process and bureaucracy everywhere and as usual, none of it works. I don't think it's really worse than in other places, c'est seulement que les Français aiment grogner plus que les autres. C'est Français ca, grogner :)
Btw, je parle bien Français alors je me demande si sa serait pas encore pire si je cherchais un appart en Anglais. Aie.
>Which means approx 30% of the housing in Paris will be banned from the renting market in the next 3 years. It started this very year.
Sorry, but what stopped the landlords/building managers from insulating the apartments in due time?
I'm assuming there was a notice period given and the insulation mandate didn't spontaneously come out of nowhere.
Could it be that most landlords are just greedy rentseekers who want to have their cake and eat it too by making easy money without investing a dime in maintenance?
If you’re genuinely interested , it’s a very long story, but let me sum it up :
- in 2019 a law was passed, scheduled for being in effect starting 2023
- in 2020 they changed the way the evaluation was performed. Instead or relying on energy bills, they decided to create a formula with a tons of parameters.
- in 2021 they realized the shity formula was overestimating consumption waayyy too much, making a lot more housing improper for renting than expected (people saw their mark going from « C » to « F » or even « G »). They adjusted it.
- in 2022, the new formula is still bogus, but nothing changed
As an example, i live in the best insulated appartment i’ve ever lived in Paris (lived there for 40 years). It’s rated G (the worst), simply because it’s on the top floor.
And here we are, in 2023, with the first batch of housing being unauthorized for rental.
That sounds like a huge fuckup on the government authorities that made this decision. Such mandates should give at least 5 years notice for owners to have time to upgrade their apartments.
Yes. But see, it’s coming from the same government that ended up closing the underwear section from supermarkets during covid « for sanitary reasons », or ended up forbidding drinking inside trains (that one lasted only for a few days, because it was too crazy even for them).
We now even have a word for the country they’re turning france into : Absurdistan.
It's in large part (almost entirely?) because the laws make it extremely difficult to evict a tenant. It can take a very long time, so there's a lot of pressure on the tenant to prove they're not a future liability.
That's the big downside of heavy tenant protections - it goes so far, landlords take protective measures like torturing you with requirements.
Sure, there is a 'shortage' of housing - but all desirable, popular international tier 1 cities have this, so the word shortage is a bit of a misnomer. Although, Tokyo has something interesting to say about that, seeing that they are dealing with it better. That said my point above about purchase prices remains: you want to buy in Paris, you pay Manhattan prices with France wages. Good luck if you're not already a foreigner (partial topic of the news we're responding to) or very rich.
International rich like to buy and warehouse apartments in Paris for occasional use.
> It's in large part (almost entirely?) because the laws make it extremely difficult to evict a tenant.
I was given that explanation by at least one letting agent, but I don't believe it because I was turned down repeatedly even though I told all the agents that my employer offered to be my guarantor. That means they would have to pay rent if I didn't.
In fact, my employer is currently my guarantor, for the apartment I finally rented. My boss had to sign a contract that in the event that I stay in the house without paying rent the company will pay the rent for one year. I'm pretty sure that also includes any costs for repairs if required. That should pretty much take care of all the risk there could possibly be in renting to me. And yet, nobody would rent to me.
So the risk is not the problem. The letting agent who gave me the apartment I'm renting commented that it's just too much hassle letting to someone like me, who doesn't have all their documentation in their "dossier de locateur". It really looks like the only reason nobody wanted to let to me was that they don't give a shit whether I find a house or not and they have plenty of takers. As the French say, ils ce foutent de ma geule.
> For the record, I'm an EU citizen and I have a doctorate in a tech subject. My French colleagues have shared similar rental horror stories. I have no idea how people manage who are worse off financially, or come from outside the EU.
Having read all of this, I have no doubt that the experience you're relating is true, nonetheless, it makes me wonder how Paris's immigration boom is happening. When I was last there, most of the people I spoke to didn't have Parisian accents, and were mostly recent immigrants. There is no way all of these people outrank someone with a doctorate in a tech field, statistically speaking. I'm curious what other factors are at play here.
> it makes me wonder how Paris's immigration boom is happening [...] There is no way all of these people outrank someone with a doctorate in a tech field, statistically speaking. I'm curious what other factors are at play here.
Because a lot of immigrants who come to Paris (and any other big metro areas like London, Berlin, New York, San Fran etc.) have no standards regarding housing and don't care about these issues. They're just happy to be in a big rich city with economic opportunities (legal and otherwise) so they can make some money and send to their families back home, regardless if they live in slum like conditions.
That makes some sense, but from my point of view my housing situation is not ideal, either: the apartment I'm renting is half the size and twice the money of what I was renting before, although I didn't live at a capital city then.
I understand your skepticism, I myself find it very hard to believe I couldn't find a place to stay in Paris.
Btw, if you're thinking of "other factors" like something dodgy about my personality, there aren't any. If there was something about me so dodgy that nobody wanted to rent to me, it would affect my ability to be employed, first. And yet I got an offer from the first startup to which I applied in Paris, so it can't be that.
Perhaps the recent immigrants you spoke with were comfortable with less ... formal? ways of renting? For example, searching for "why so hard to rent in Paris foreigner" on duckduckgo, I find this account of similar difficulties as mine:
<< I arrived in Paris thinking it would be easy to find a place to live, and the end result ended up being years of dodgy landlords, questionable agencies, and a string of short-term leases which made me feel like I always had to be ready to pack up at a moment’s notice. >>
I'm guessing there are many people living in similar precarious accommodation. I didn't want that, so I guess I played on hard mode to begin with. But the point is that the hard mode is hard, and I'm not playing some game, I'm just trying to rent a place to stay and work in a European capital. It shouldn't be hard.
Berlin is far from a shithole. It's a beautiful international city with some problems, but compared to Paris' banlieues or New York filth and trash, all of Berlin's troubles are absolutely minute. For comparison, while there is some "gang" activity in Berlin, rival gangs beating each others in public swimming pools makes national news.
I like it too but only to visit and party every now and then, since, due to the massive liberal and expat/immigrant population there, it's the only place in Germany where I feel comfortable and at home, and not in a conservative conformist dystopian nightmare, despite me being fluent in German.
But with the general poor state of the city despite the high income taxes, and that terrible housing market over there I can't ever see myself moving there to live permanently today. In hindsight maybe 4-5 years ago, when housing was still easier to find, would have been the better time for that but not in the current housing market. If you lucked out and got a nice flat before housing went to hell, good for you. But then good luck next time you need to move again.
Unless all you care about is tech start-ups and wild parties with drugs and cheap food and beer, the housing market there and general poor state makes it a bad place to live if you're used to high quality of life cities that are well kept, like Vienna for example.
I'd like to live in a place where finding housing that isn't overpriced and poorly maintained, isn't a full time job in of itself where you waste dozens of hours calling agents and fighting with hundreds of people hunger games style just for the opportunity of living in an overpriced shitty uninsulated flat that hasn't seen any renovations or modernization since the early '80s (if you're lucky).
Maybe I'm getting old, but since I'm not a student anymore, the party scene doesn't make up for that huge hassle.
>but compared to Munich rent is still affordable in Berlin
I hear this a lot, and this may still have been the case 4 years ago or so, but I feel this is mostly coming from people who found housing in Berlin before Covid and aren't experiencing the current market.
Gosh, how do you reckon bigger cities manage it? Oh right, they just do. And you aren’t the last one in the door, so stop gatekeeping new entrants before you’re forced to stop.
> There seems to be a general lack of political will for big projects in the west.
The spectacular thing about the housing crisis is that you don't even need any big government projects. It just needs to be legal for private actors to build housing. On most plots of land today it is not legal to build anything but a single-family home, so cities are no longer able to naturally densify over time (just like every single modern city did 100 years ago, so that they could become the cities they are today).
My impression from the UK, which seems to have a similar housing shortage and restrictive zoning laws, is that there is another piece to this jigsaw, namely infrastructure.
There are a fair few housing developments in the UK which provide the quantity and density needed, but eg don't have sufficient roads to support the increased traffic, causing gridlocks. Similar story for schools or shops.
I want to believe this, but my personal experience shows the opposite. I live in Berlin, and there's a severe housing shortage, even though Berlin is very big geographically, and 5 story buildings are the norm, many even as mixed-use.
Why is this? Because there's a strong inflow from all over the world and not enough building. Meanwhile prices are going up without regard to incomes, and it is incredibly hard to get even a viewing, let alone be offered an apartment. On top of that, most of the stock is old and not modernized at all.
Even for private owners, it is better to not build and let scarcity drive the price of their investments higher, than to take the risk of building and potentially see rents or prices fall.
Decades ago when the West was developed, there was very little value placed on the existing stuff. Five people died constructing the Empire State building. Do you imagine the uproar if that happens today? I bet human life was valued much less back then. Similarly, lots of neighborhoods were erased to make way for highways, railroads and industrial plants. Nowadays, try constructing an industrial plant in a major city center and you will discover that people care a lot of their clean air and clear water.
There is also a related but separate aspect where environmental activists erected barriers to slow down any development. You still feel its effects today where CEQA is weaponized to slow down a small apartment housing.
If the highway were there the cultural epicenter would just be elsewhere. It doesn’t really matter where your infrastructure is. You need X infrastructure for Y people and development will naturally happen to take advantage of it.
In Boston they did the reverse of your example. They took a subway and moved it in to fill the void where a highway was supposed to go before it got cancelled. If they hadn’t cancelled the highway that subway would still be where it used to be. As an aside, the people who cancelled it really have a lot of blood on their hands because a bunch of major surface streets got developed into main thoroughfares as a result and we all know how good it is to have a highway speed road that isn’t grade separated from cross streets, pedestrians and cyclists…
To be fair with both the lower and mid manhattan expressway plans, they were at one point planning for buildings being built above and below the elevated grades. It wasn't just going to be dead space.
> Five people died constructing the Empire State building. Do you imagine the uproar if that happens today?
People still die on construction projects all the time, on relatively uninteresting things even. eg, in 2019 four people died when a crane working above a Google office building in Seattle collapsed. It was local news for a few weeks, but I'm not sure it had any other effects, regulatory or otherwise.
> Looking at Asia now is like what the west used to be like.
There is a huge property bubble in China, so I'm not sure if that is good example for us to follow. Japan is a better model, where a declining population and weariness of a huge real estate bubble that popped in the late 80s has made investing property not very feasible.
Property "bubbles" only matter when housing is scarce and therefore treated as an investment. We all understand why the recent run-up in used car prices was bad for most people, even if it meant that the people who owned a car enjoyed a sudden spike in the value of that "asset." We don't want the things we buy to be more expensive. We want them to be less expensive. Falling prices are good.
I lived in Beijing for 9 years and literally could look through unfinished peepholes of apartments (which would be called condos in the states) and see that they weren't even renovated yet. The building would be sold out years ago, but only 25% of the apartments were being lived in. And you really need to look at rents: if a 8 million RMB apartment that is on the market is also renting for 5000 RMB/month...ya, something is wrong.
It never made sense for me to buy property in China (which I was eligible to do after being there for 6 years), since rent prices were so cheap in comparison.
I’ve gotten downvoted for mentioning this on HN before but I’ll say it again - all we would need to do to largely stabilize housing prices would be to secure our borders. Our population growth is largely due to immigration, and right now we’re letting in over a million immigrants a year who will statistically have more children than the people that are already here.
I don't think immigration is strictly our problem. Well, it actually might be: it is really hard to find people to build houses right now, and legal immigration of skilled construction workers from Mexico and Central America would really do a lot to solve that problem. But then we might be screwing those countries.
That seems unlikely. A difference of a million or so out of 350 million Americans is not going to have much impact on stabilizing housing. Further, poor immigrants are not buying houses. Perhaps we have to look at regulating foreign buyers, you know, folks with money. But blaming immigrants seems misplaced.
"Last year, 912,000 single-family homes were built, according to building permit data from the US Census. The US population grew by more than 3 million people in that time."
Cutting that population growth by 1/3rd (or more, really, considering children) sure would help that number, would it not? A huge, huge portion of our population growth is due to illegal immigration.
It's more than a million. And there are delayed effects, like family members coming and of course a higher reproductive rate. Just more people to house in general. Of course immigration is a good thing overall, but let's get skilled workers in first and then fill the rest of the space fairly.
You picked a very good anecdote because it was precisely the era of governments razing entire neighbourhoods to arbitrarily build highways without the support of the locals who lived there that induced the backlash in the 70s against top down government planning.
Basically government poisoned the well itself and has still yet to really deal with the consequences.
Now things have gone too far, what was once local activism has been taken over by established wealth interests, and development is paralyzed.
While I don't think it was due to foresight as compared to, say, nimbyism, those parts of the world that are putting the brakes on development may be making the right choice. World population will peak later this century, and it has already peaked locally in many places. Some infrastructure will become a white elephant going forward once the population it was built for declines.
I feel bad for those who are stuck without adequate or inexpensive housing in the meantime, but in the aggregate it may be wise to not overbuild now.
The problem in a place like the US is mostly the distribution of jobs. There are places with abundant housing that also lack for jobs.
> Looking at Asia now is like what the west used to be like.
China has the political will for big projects. China also gets them done, and done fast. Yet China also has a housing problem, much greater than the West.
In China's case, the government deliberately creates a shortage of supply by restricting the usage of land. They also printed money directly into the housing market in 2015 when the housing bubble looked likely to burst. It is not a lack of ability to control housing prices. Instead, they have the ability and does control housing prices, by controlling them upwards.
It's NIMBYism. Most people in a state like California will agree that more affordable housing needs to be built, but no one wants it in their back yard.
Looking at Asia now is like what the west used to be like.
I am unsure about the cause but I suspect that a lot of it is that people seem a lot more worried about consultation with locals and such.
In the past the government might just decide “we are building a highway here” or “we are building all this infrastructure for houses there” and there seemed to be a lot less consideration for how people affected would feel about it.
Media has gotten more pervasive, so we might imagine that politicians are more concerned about things flaring up there, but Asia has plenty of media access too, so that doesn’t really explain it.