Fr you never see ranch houses being built anymore, they’re all luxury townhouses or multi story mcmansions or generic suburb homes that trade good design for maximum sq ft.
I just want a small house with a decent yard… $500k easy around where I live. The affordable ones are bought above asking price and demolished to build two-flats or luxury homes.
Man I’m in the same boat. I bought a short sale condo during the housing collapse and I’m selling it now to buy a house…150k for a down payment and I can’t find SHIT I can afford.
I want a 2-3 bedroom house with enough room for a workshop (meaning a basement or 2-car garage) and ANY sized yard. The only ones I can find within an hour radius are 100k too expensive or need 100k in work.
That’s because what you want doesn’t make economic sense to produce. You could make it work economically* to have a small house on a small lot, but if you’re forcing developers to build only a single house on a large lot (and that’s exactly what the zoning code does), then it’s going to be a big one in order for the developer to make the profit margin he needs.
(* I initially wrote “you could have,” but changed it because you actually can’t have that. Not because the economics wouldn’t work, but because the zoning code often just prohibits the “small house on small lot” market segment outright.)
Edit: quit downvoting facts, NIMBYs. Why is it so threatening to you for me to accurately identify the problem?
Well maybe we shouldn’t turn something people need to survive into a game of min/max P&L. I know construction and real estate companies need a profit to survive, but unchecked profit maximizing is bad for everyone but shareholders.
Why build a ranch when you can build a 2flat or multi family unit that takes up the entire lot, that only corporations can scoop up as an investment, or already wealthy individuals can buy outright and rent it out to squeeze any potential profit out of the working class that’s struggling to survive. That’s why there’s so few affordable single family homes being built, and if you don’t see that as a problem right now then I don’t know what to tell ya.
Why build a ranch when you can build a 2flat or multi family unit that takes up the entire lot
Because MULTIFAMILY IS LITERALLY PROHIBITED BY LAW. How many times do I have to say it?!
I realize that it’s cool on Lemmy to hate the capitalists and all that (and I don’t even disagree!), but in this case it’s the racists and NIMBYs and car-brains that y’all really have beef with. The developers are just working within the system that those groups insisted upon creating.
Edit: silent downvoters are too cowardly to respond to defend their position.
You’re not wrong, but developers have a lot of pull in local government and their influence on those policies shouldn’t be overlooked. They’re also pushing for single-family zoning because the profit margins on those are higher than on multi-family.
As someone very involved in local politics, it’s been my experience that the NIMBYs have way more influence than the developers.
Also, the “profit margins are higher on single-family than multi-family” is a result of the zoning, not a reason for it. If zoning were reformed to be sane, profit margins on multifamily would be higher (in part, for example, because land zoned for multifamily wouldn’t be artificially inflated in price due to extreme scarcity).
Fr you never see ranch houses being built anymore, they’re all luxury townhouses or multi story mcmansions or generic suburb homes that trade good design for maximum sq ft.
I just want a small house with a decent yard… $500k easy around where I live. The affordable ones are bought above asking price and demolished to build two-flats or luxury homes.
Man I’m in the same boat. I bought a short sale condo during the housing collapse and I’m selling it now to buy a house…150k for a down payment and I can’t find SHIT I can afford.
I want a 2-3 bedroom house with enough room for a workshop (meaning a basement or 2-car garage) and ANY sized yard. The only ones I can find within an hour radius are 100k too expensive or need 100k in work.
If you’re the kind of person who wants a workshop, “need 100k in work” might be a trade-off you should make.
I do small stuff unfortunately, not construction lol
I WISH I could laser cut or resin print a structurally-stable house
That’s because what you want doesn’t make economic sense to produce. You could make it work economically* to have a small house on a small lot, but if you’re forcing developers to build only a single house on a large lot (and that’s exactly what the zoning code does), then it’s going to be a big one in order for the developer to make the profit margin he needs.
(* I initially wrote “you could have,” but changed it because you actually can’t have that. Not because the economics wouldn’t work, but because the zoning code often just prohibits the “small house on small lot” market segment outright.)
Edit: quit downvoting facts, NIMBYs. Why is it so threatening to you for me to accurately identify the problem?
Well maybe we shouldn’t turn something people need to survive into a game of min/max P&L. I know construction and real estate companies need a profit to survive, but unchecked profit maximizing is bad for everyone but shareholders.
Why build a ranch when you can build a 2flat or multi family unit that takes up the entire lot, that only corporations can scoop up as an investment, or already wealthy individuals can buy outright and rent it out to squeeze any potential profit out of the working class that’s struggling to survive. That’s why there’s so few affordable single family homes being built, and if you don’t see that as a problem right now then I don’t know what to tell ya.
Because MULTIFAMILY IS LITERALLY PROHIBITED BY LAW. How many times do I have to say it?!
I realize that it’s cool on Lemmy to hate the capitalists and all that (and I don’t even disagree!), but in this case it’s the racists and NIMBYs and car-brains that y’all really have beef with. The developers are just working within the system that those groups insisted upon creating.
Edit: silent downvoters are too cowardly to respond to defend their position.
You’re not wrong, but developers have a lot of pull in local government and their influence on those policies shouldn’t be overlooked. They’re also pushing for single-family zoning because the profit margins on those are higher than on multi-family.
As someone very involved in local politics, it’s been my experience that the NIMBYs have way more influence than the developers.
Also, the “profit margins are higher on single-family than multi-family” is a result of the zoning, not a reason for it. If zoning were reformed to be sane, profit margins on multifamily would be higher (in part, for example, because land zoned for multifamily wouldn’t be artificially inflated in price due to extreme scarcity).