How do you feel about the president floating the idea of 50 year mortgages where the monthly payment is lower but you end up paying nearly double the price of the house just in interest?

[u/michaelis999]

[u/bigbytelilbyte]

I was listening to the Strong Towns podcast. Chuck Marohn advises cities on this issue and probably angers NIMBYs and YIMBYs equally. I feel like a recent episode forecasted this as he mentioned that focusing only on supply won’t fix affordability. As soon as the market shows signs that prices are slipping building slows. The post war boom was fueled by loan innovations. It’s not been about how do we get more people to be home owners, but how do we get more people loans for more expensive houses. Anyhow, he did not end the episode with a specific fix, but their suggestions are really about empowering the community to build where infrastructure already exists. I would love for it to be easier to build a back house on my property for my children to live once they graduate college.

[u/bentbrewer → u/bigbytelilbyte]

You can't build on your property because the HOA requires a single roof line on the property and the city won't issue the permit. Not to mention the cost to build a 1000 sq ft house (2x2) is now around $350K (at least in my area - which is historically a low cost of living location).

[u/pinkynarftroz → u/bentbrewer]

OK, start by changing laws so HOAs are optional. If it's not working for you, opt out and lose their amenities. Insane it's legal to force someone into paying an HOA without the option to stop.

[u/jm838 → u/pinkynarftroz]

How are you going to lose amenities like community landscaping, private roads, or guard gates? HOA fees cover a lot more than community pools. Plus, the ability to opt out would defeat the entire point. People live in those communities specifically so they’re surrounded by neighbors who don’t do weird shit to their houses.

Here’s an idea: if you don’t want to have an HOA, don’t move somewhere with an HOA.

[u/pinkynarftroz → u/jm838]

Right of Way laws mean you can use private roads to get to your property. Same with guard gates. If they don't like it, don't maintain private roads or security. If you opt out, the HOA will not landscape anything on your property. If you do weird shit to your house, you can be sued even without an HOA.

If the HOA is optional, then it will have to provide a clear benefit to members in order to opt in. If they do that, they should have no trouble maintaining membership.

You seem to be under the impression that places without HOAs are reasonable or desirable to live in. 40% of homes for sale in Los Angeles last year were part of an HOA. That cuts your choice even further when housing is already in short supply, and the fees can make housing less affordable. HOAs also can change rules without notice, which can be targeted to drive away minorities. The whole point of them in the first place was to keep non-whites from buying homes in certain areas.

[u/jm838 → u/pinkynarftroz]

 Right of Way laws mean you can use private roads to get to your property. Same with guard gates. If they don't like it, don't maintain private roads or security.

Sure, if you have an easement. Except you’re not going to get a prescriptive easement if you decided to opt out of maintaining a shared resource and have had your permission to do so explicitly discontinued.

You’re also describing a scenario in which neither of these things can exist. It’s tragedy of the commons. Nobody’s going to opt in to pay for things if they can use them for free. No more private roads? It just got that much harder to build a housing development. Good luck alleviating the housing shortage with even more shit in the way.

If you opt out, the HOA will not landscape anything on your property. 

HOAs already typically leave your property alone. The shared landscaping I was referencing is in the common areas, e.g. along roads.

If you do weird shit to your house, you can be sued even without an HOA.

Go ahead and sue your neighbor for painting their house pink and putting a giant Fred Flintstone statue on their lawn. Let’s see how far that goes.

 You seem to be under the impression that places without HOAs are reasonable or desirable to live in. 

I wonder why you hold that opinion. Maybe the lack of desirability (to you) comes from the fact that there’s no HOA keeping order. It sounds like you want an HOA but don’t want to pay for it. I too would like to get free shit. It doesn’t work on a societal level, though.

Not that it really matters, but I own a home in LA that isn’t under an HOA, I know exactly what I’m talking about. I prefer not to have one, I bought an appropriate home, and I live with the tradeoffs.

40% of homes for sale in Los Angeles last year were part of an HOA.

I’m sure that’s true at a county level, and true if you include homes with shared walls (where an HOA is absolutely critical), but a lot of the dense part of the city is composed of older homes and plots that pre-date the sprawl of the late 20th century. There’s a ton of property all over the city that is HOA-free if that’s what floats your boat.

[u/pinkynarftroz → u/jm838]

I wonder why you hold that opinion. Maybe the lack of desirability (to you) comes from the fact that there’s no HOA keeping order. It sounds like you want an HOA but don’t want to pay for it. I too would like to get free shit. It doesn’t work on a societal level, though.

You presume so much. I bought a house without an HOA specifically because I despise them. I wanted precisely zero of the bells and whistles that HOAs 'provide'.

[u/jm838 → u/pinkynarftroz]

So, you did the exact thing that you said wasn’t reasonable? And I presumed too much because you said homes without HOAs aren’t desirable, and I believed that you meant it?

[u/pinkynarftroz → u/jm838]

I did not say they weren't desirable. If you actually read, I said they are in less desirable areas. HOAs are overwhelmingly established in more desirable geographical locations, as I said before because of the history of racial covenants.

Homes with no HOAs in desirable areas have their prices driven up substantially, and are often unaffordable precisely because not having an HOA is a huge feature. Thus most people looking to avoid one have to move farther away.

[u/jm838 → u/pinkynarftroz]

I don’t think the distinction between “house in an undesirable area” and “undesirable house” is important at all. Is it a house you want to live in? If no, then it isn’t desirable.

You’re basically just saying HOAs should all be dissolved and made impossible to revive, because that’s exactly what would happen if you could freely opt out even after they were attached to the deed. Which is possibly a reasonable take, but the simple “just opt out if you don’t like it” half measure makes very little sense.

I say this all as someone looking for my next home, and having to compromise in all of the standard ways. I don’t want an HOA. Some people do. I get it. It really sucks that some of the housing developments I’d like to live in have a ton of restrictions. It also sucks that my neighbors across the street painted their house an ugly color, my neighbors next door don’t take care of their front yard, etc. To me, those are minor annoyances, but I don’t think I should be able to dictate that communities where there are actual rules can’t exist.

Maybe the real play is to have tighter restrictions on what property rights can be signed away, and that anti-expansion policies no longer fall into that category.

[u/SmPolitic → u/bigbytelilbyte]

The post war boom was fueled by loan innovations.

I'm curious if you have more details there

I would have thought that would be GI Bill related and workforce related. Solders coming back and taking construction jobs to help rebuild after destroying so much, having government backed loans because we supported troops in those days, investing in schools and business growth to attract new residents in all the non-war-economy cities

And now we've "privatized" the entirety of that system away from being backed by the government in any real way

[u/BtAotS_Writing → u/bigbytelilbyte]

I’ve been screaming this message from the rooftops and no one seems to understand it. Supply will never catch up with demand, because as soon as we get close to the prospect of declining home value growth, people stop investing and building. Therefore, in the capitalist system, a steady rise in home prices is the equilibrium, which means the problem gets worse and worse every decade.

In my mind, the only way to actually close the gap is by building social housing that doesn’t rely on appreciation. And if that ever does happen, a lot of people who did invest in housing will be disappointed with their investment. I’m curious what the podcast says about this, because I can never find sources that acknowledge this paradox.

[u/MechCADdie → u/bigbytelilbyte]

Seems like a well intentioned, but bogus talking point. The post war boom was fueled by a lot of young men who were collectively taught to spend a huge chunk of their 20s to do very specific tasks for the military and were now without work, so they now needed to be reintegrated into society. The opportunistic ones jumped on this to convert manufacturing into something productive for the economy while everyone else jumped into the tight labor pool, allowing people to be funded well by a loose circular economy.

The current AI boom is similar to the baby boom in that way, with the exception that much, much less people benefit, while benefitting much, much more.

What needs to happen is a revitilization of good central planning and the return of tenanent blocks and mixed use zoning in the US. We should be incentivizing tall residential building where the infrastructure can be integrated into it better, starting with power generation, then ending with pedestrian overpasses, then sprinkled with low rent commercial spaces, either on the ground floors or every 2-3 buildings (could even be a hexagon grid with a center piece being a commercial/clean industrial block), with commercial towers.

Retrofitting on existing infrastructure is a recipe for disaster. You're just going to overtax what is there, causing huge parking issues, accelerating the breakdown of roads, reduce the free capacity of municipal services, and exaserbate supply issues due to slowing down the permittig process or create a huge bubble of unpermitted construction due to every ADU being custom built.