Rich and Strange Aeons

Food stamps are so redistributionist. Would it not be better instead to require every new grocery store to sell 10% of its food at affordable prices, to low-income people? Putting the cost of food welfare entirely on newly opened stores and their higher-income customers, while everyone else contributes nothing? Having the supply of food welfare be linked tightly to the opening of new grocery stores?

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On Facebook, Strong Towns asked again "would you live in 400 sqft", getting comments like "yes", "no", "400 square feet without a roommate may be possible", "900 sqft is too small" (for an apparently single person).

I've lived in various small places, even before Airbnb life. But here's some math:

10x12 ft bedroom, 120 sqft. 3x10 walk-in closet, 30 sqft. 10x12 living/dining room, 120 sqft. 6x10 kitchen, 60 sqft. 6x6 bathroom, 36 sqft. Total 366 sqft, leaving 34 extra -- another closet, a laundry nook, a vestibule, more space in one of the other rooms, etc.

Not *huge*, but nothing there feels too cramped. My current bathroom is maybe 33 sqft and feels fine, some more room would be nice but there's a bathtub and I'm not folding myself like origami. My kitchen is about that size and is fine. The bedroom would easily take a twin bed and door-sized desk, or less easily a queen bed and same desk.

https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2021/4/27/are-new-homes-mostly-luxury-does-it-matter-if-they-are

* new construction does lower prices
* most homes are inhabited, and vacancy rates are low in high cost cities; keeping housing off the market isn't a big thing
* "luxury" is a meaningless marketing term, applicable to utterly banal stuff. Also a meaningless term of opprobrium, as when owners of $2 million homes sneer at $500,000 "luxury" condos.
* But what is normal now is more 'luxurious' than in 1971. New apartments come with amenity services like concierge, gyms, pools. Houses have doubled in size and are on larger lots.
* Actual cost of constructing housing hasn't changed much, but costs go up with land cost and size.

* Main thing driving all that is zoning laws: they require large lots, off-street parking, and low levels of density. And when stuff has to be expensive, you aim upmarket, thus gyms.

* Adding my own knowledge here: absuridities like 800 square foot studios can probably be explained by zoning laws requiring more parking for 1BRs than for studios.

Two-part post from 2017 at kchoze

https://urbankchoze.blogspot.com/2016/08/building-affordable-housing-where-has.html

https://urbankchoze.blogspot.com/2016/12/building-affordable-housing-remembering.html

Something I've been struggling with recently: my various models of a city built around cars yield numbers similar to actual densities. My models of human oriented cities yield much higher densities than the real cities that inspire them. But I think I've realized at least part of why.

To recap:

Car city model: assume 1/3 is streets/roads, 1/3 is zoned residential, 1/3 commercial. Assume half the commercial land is surface parking, at 30 m2/space. A model km2 thus can have 1e6 m2/6/30 m2/space = 5555 parking spaces; at 3 non-residential spaces per car, that's 1851 cars. Multiply by 1.25 for non-drivers, and get a population density of 2300 people/km2, which is about as dense as post-war cities get in the US.

People city model: 1/3 street, and the rest with an average residential FAR of 2.0, whether that's residential neighborhoods with houses or mixed/commercial neighbhoods with housing above shops. That's 1.3e6 m2 of living space per km2, allowing 33,000 people at 40 m2 per person (reasonable to me) or 16,600 people at 80 m2 per person (current US average).

Osaka and Tokyo, which at least *look* like they should be hitting FAR 2 or greater -- lots of 2 story houses filling their lots, lots of high rises -- are 12,000 and 15,000 people/km2, at only 19 m2 per person. That's off by a factor of 4.

But my people model assumes no cars at all, or that they can treated as trivial. In fact Japan supposedly has a lot of cars, 0.6 per person nationwide. Assuming only 2 parking spaces per car, that's 0.6*2*30 = 36 m2 of parking per person, while nationwide there are 22 m2 of living space per person. So there's as much, or more, parking than living space, even in Japan. The cities would have fewer cars but also less space per person.

And that's cars parked in multi-level garages taking half of the built up floor area. Much of the urban parking is actually open surface lots, whether small commercial lots in neighborhoods or parking attached to stores. When all the surrounding building is lot-filling 2+ story buildings, each 30 m2 of surface parking displaces 60 or more m2 of floor space.

So there's a factor of 2. It's also possible I overestimate the average residential FAR, not accounting for industrial zones or parks and shrines or overestimating mixed buildings, I dunno.

This adjusted model implies that a huge chunk of Tokyo buildings are parking, which wasn't my impression, but also wasn't something I was paying attention to. Of course, I was also mostly in places not far from train lines.

Hmm, this says that in new Tokyo (23 wards) condominiums, the ratio of parking to spaces is 30% -- 2064 spaces for 7008 apartments. But in 2007 the ratio was 56%. I don't know how big these condos are: studios, 2BR, what? Or how many people are in each one. But an average of 15 m2 of parking attached to each not very big condo is a fairly sized chunk.

Caveat: Japanese cars are smaller; there's also robotic parking that I assume takes less space overall. Houses can have parking lots that go directly to the street and thus don't need access lanes, though these are often open surface parking that displace multi-story density above them.

This is tangentially fascinating -- cities limited wheeled carts even before cars, with most transport by canal; most canals were later filled in to make arterial roads; less than 2% of Japanese streets are wider than 5.5 m, and 35% are too narrow for even one car.

I have failed to find how many parking spaces Japan or its cities have.

Been doing a lot of Strong Towns reading today on missing middle housing, incremental development, small developers, and such. It inspired a new calculation:

Consider a typical suburban quarter acre lot, about 1000 m2, maybe currently hosting a modern 3000 foot2 (300 m2) house. I'm not sure what the dimension of the lot are, let's say 20x50 meters. Imagine a 2 meter wide access lane down the length, leaving 18 meters width; and 5 meter wide townhouses fitting in sideways, so 10 of them (50/5). Make them 3-story. 5x18=90 m2 ground plan, 270 m2 square feet in each townhouse, putting 10 rather large houses in the space of one suburban lot. Or 30 decent sized apartments, big enough for 2 or even 3 BR without much cramping. 10-30 times the density, with no particular height, just efficient use of the land.

Maybe the lot dimensions are 25x40 meters. With a similar configuration, but 4 meter wide homes, you get 10 4x23=92 m2 buildings, and similar density increase.

Or, stick a 3 meter access lane down the middle, have 5m wide homes again, and have 8 5x11=55 m2 buildings on each side, 16 total. At 3 stories, get 16 165m2 houses, or 48 55m2 apartments, or some combination thereof.

The depth makes conventional orientation a bit problematic: at 40 meter depth, even 4 meter width gives 160 m2 ground use. Which is fine if you go all in for apartments, less fine if you want the option of reasonably sized but multi-story houses. An article on the blocks of NYC said even their lots of 25x100 feet (30 m deep) was too deep for a modest rowhouse, thus encouraging tenements.

(The assumption is that land is valuable enough to not have yards on most housing.)

Really narrow houses are 3 meters wide! At 30 meters depth that's still 90 m2 ground plan, and 270 m2 for a whole row home.

The final message: 1/4 or even 1/8 acre lots can support far more people without building over 3 stories, but deep lots may either lend themselves to apartments or to odd orientations of row homes, and some legal flexibility if the homeowners are to own their land.

Parking spaces vary in size, but a US DOT standard for parking lots is 8.5x19 feet (~2.6x5.8 m), 161.5 square feet, almost exactly 15 square meters. That's in the low range of microapartments (Wiki says 150-350 feet, 14-32 m2) or tiny houses (100-400 feet2.) Squeeze in some stairs (or ladder, anyway) and you can double the space with two stories, into the high end of the range.

And that's just the parking space itself, not the total area per space in a parking lot, though of course people need space to move around in as well.

Non-compact parking spaces generally accommodate vans, generally 1.8-2.1 m wide and 4.8-6.2 m long. Vans can be turned into campervans or "Class B" motorhomes.

Compact spaces are 8x16 feet, 128 feet2 or 11.89 m2.

Parallel parking spaces likewise vary, but ranges seem to be 2.1-2.4 m wide and 6.1-7.9 m long, for an area of 13-19 m2.

So the opportunity cost of a parking space is a home -- a little room/studio for one person, or a decent small home for a person or couple. In current high value cities, that would be easily worth $600/month (new SROs in Seattle were going for that). With campervans and somewhere nearby to go to change water/waste/batteries, a parking space can be someone's home even without direct plumbing and power hookups, easily worth, oh, $100/month in land rent. Vs. a residential parking permit of $40/year (Somerville) or $25 (Cambridge, last I checked) or $0 (Boston, for as many cars as you register.)

Or of course you can group two or three spaces together to get something more like a conventionally sized home that would easily rent for $1000/month or more.

Follow-up to Osaka house size and Urban density.

So, buildings here tend to fill their lots and not have yards. They're certainly *allowed* to have setbacks and yards, unlike the draconian land-use and FAR (floor area ratio) regulations of the US, but through much of Osaka they don't. (There are yards in Japan, I've seen them in Nara and Kyoto away from the city centers, in Kyoto not even that far from a train station, in Nara not far from a bus running every 4 minutes.)

Imagine that every lot is 1000 square feet, which allows for a quite ample two-story house, even with a parking space or two (say 200 square feet per space[1]), and/or a strip for plants. Imagine that half the urban land is devoted to such residential lots (after streets and non-residential uses.) That allows for 5381 houses per square kilometer. Assuming an average of 2 people per household (2.55 seems a more accurate 2010 number for Japan) that's nearly 11,000 people per square kilometer -- considerably denser than San Francisco or Somerville (both around 7,000) or anywhere else in the US outside NYC. At 2.5 people per house that's 13,500 people per square kilometer, on the order of Bronx and Brooklyn. Without needing a single home taller than 2 stories, and giving 1000-2000 square feet per home (unless you build a one story home with two parking spaces, and then you're just asking for it.)

It certainly can be nice to have your own yard. But US yard are big enough for second homes. We shouldn't be *requiring* them.

(Note: Osaka overall doesn't look like this, there are many tall buildings. Parts of it and I think Tokyo do look like it, though. And it's an interesting exercise. And my current lot is probably more like 200 square feet.)

[1] Interesting effect of most of the streets being one-lane alleys shared by all modes: no sidewalk, so no curb cut effect from having a driveway.

Parking lots and garages in the US need at least 330 square feet per car because of access lanes, but curbside spaces or house parking that opens directly to the street are different. Hmm, actually the space use of driveways should include the curb cut and denied parking space as well as the car space on the private lot, but again not an issue when there is no curb or street parking.

A longish article on cities (or a country) that have built their way to affordable housing, contrary to the claims of many market-allergic leftists.

http://www.sightline.org/2017/09/21/yes-you-can-build-your-way-to-affordable-housing/

Money-quote paragraph:

"Houston, for example, can be Cascadia’s model for how easy it ought to be to get permits to build homes—if we believed, as Houston does, that building homes is in itself a good thing, our permitting processes would encourage rather than discourage it through endless months of hoop-jumping and politicized reviews. Tokyo, meanwhile, reminds us that placing control over development at senior levels of government, and making development of urban property a right of its owner, helps to elevate the broad public interest in abundant housing choices over parochial opposition to change. (Leaders in California have recently succeeded in passing a raft of new laws to act upon this lesson.) Chicago teaches that a pro-housing political orientation can provide abundant housing even under conventional zoning in a deep blue city, while Montreal offers Cascadia a model of a cityscape no longer of single-family homes but of three-story rowhouses, walk-up apartments, and condominiums on quiet, tree-lined streets close to transit and neighborhood centers. Singapore’s lesson is the promise of erecting high-density, park-like “new towns” on underused city land. And Germany shows us that a future is possible where housing is no longer an investment vehicle but “a very durable consumption good that provides a stream of housing services, not a ticket to financial gain.”"


Relatedly, Vienna and Singapore as two examples of massive public housing: https://www.shareable.net/blog/public-housing-works-lessons-from-vienna-and-singapore
Also useful if anyone tries to tout Singapore as a free-market miracle...

In which I argue that the lack of affordable housing indicates something horribly wrong, and not with capitalism as such.

Have you heard of Walmart? Of course you have. What are they known for? Providing lots and lots of cheap shit. Also for bullying local governments and squeezing suppliers, but that's not the point here, which is: cheap shit. They have nicer competitors: Target, Kmart, Dollar Stores.

Plane seats are jammed and humiliating but also cheaper than they ever have been, modulo gas prices.

You can spend thousands of dollars on a fancy bicycle, or less than $100 on a cheap one.

Stores are full of cheap, if sometimes unhealthy, food.

You can spend under $13,000, or maybe $12,000 on a new car, or over $100,000 on a luxury sports car.

Many of us wear cheap clothes, "from Third World sweatshops"; others spend $thousands on elite designer clothing.

You can get a watch for $15, or $1500. They'll tell time about the same.

Our economy is full of selling cheap stuff to the masses and expensive stuff to the rich, and various things in between, (sometimes including selling cheap stuff for higher prices, if you can pull off price discrimination.) Because that's how you make the most profit, not by only making luxury stuff.

But in housing, particularly in some markets, it's said that developers are only building luxury housing. If true, why would that be? Why would housing be unlike every other part of the economy?

"Everyone needs housing, so they can extort you." Nope, that won't fly. Everyone needs food and clothing, and in the US lots of people need cars.

"They're just chasing profit." But the point of my examples is that there's tons of profit in non-luxury goods and services. Walmart is *huge*, with its founder's children inheriting $20 billion each of accumulated profit.

And in fact, if you look around the world, you do see cheap(er) housing options. Mobile and manufactured homes for the individual, pre-fab housing for soulless but cheap developer tracts, microapartments that cut living space to 100 square feet, SRO hotels that go further by making you share bathroom and kitchen (if any), granny apartments. In cheap land markets (prefab housing in surbuban developments) and expensive ones (microapartments in Tokyo and Hong Kong.)

But not in Boston, or San Francisco. Why not? Is there something about those places that makes developers spontaneously ignore non-luxury demand? Or is something, like zoning laws and permitting processes, preventing them from doing so?

If you know me, you probably know my answer: the latter. But if you don't like that answer, what's your alternative? Why don't we see Walmarts, Spirit Airlines, $15 watches, and $13,000 cars of modern urban housing?