Pretty much any criticism of a current housing market can't happen without mentioning the quality of said housing. I have just come back from one of the apartments I was looking at to see an abysmally small shoebox with some sort of doors and windows installed in there. I live in a house with 9-foot ceilings and I feel like a king. But this is insane.
Recently I've visited a rental property to find shallow, not sound-proofed walls, askew doors made of something that looks like paper and not a single straight corner. And this is a 2023 build! It's brand new. And still looks awful.
I have an article about that. https://medium.com/@ifcllc/qualification-f33ec8fcb736 but man, it's getting worse and worse.
Just to have a 2-room apartment that I used to live in 30 years ago would cost over 1.5 mil today. Adjusted for that inflation of quality.
That's right, and that's caused by restrictions on supply. Almost every problem we have with housing comes down to us restricting how much can be built so much that extremely low quality units are competitive. If you allowed 10 times as much construction, those units wouldn't be able to compete, because other builders would offer better units for the same price.
Apparel markets are much more free and competitive than housing markets, and have basically no restrictions on supply. Yet, the quality of available clothing across the world have fallen. And we get incredibly cheap incredibly low-quality garbage.
These things are much more complex than simplistic single-variable models.
I don't think clothing quality has fallen. Quite the opposite. We are able to buy high quality clothing at a very low price. More advanced materials, more consistent construction, better construction, greater selection, etc.
Much of what you can buy today did not even exist 30 years ago. For example, trail running shoes more or less did not exist. Perhaps you could have had a pair custom made, at a high price, with the worse materials available at the time, but today you can them "off the shelf".
Even the many shirts I've received for free are very high quality and have endured years of abuse.
This is substantially better than really bad apartments that are expensive or nice apartments that are very expensive!
It is not actually more complex, you don't spend ~40% of CPI on apparel.
> the quality of available clothing across the world have fallen
Do you have a source for this? Anecdotes along the lines of "they don't make 'em like they used to" are incredibly common but often fail to stand up to scrutiny.
Circumstantially, the dominance of fast fashion, produced quickly and sold cheaply, suggests that some aspect of production is more "efficient" than historically so. I've seen YouTube fashion experts explain exactly how (lower quality fabrics, simpler and less durable sewing, cuts that use less fabric than would be so in higher quality garments), and while I'm not experienced enough to corroborate, they were convincing.
I mean by that logic wouldn't the cheap house just cost even less? What about housing prevents it from being a race to the bottom like every other product?
Like yes a nice pair of boots costs more and you do get more value out of them compared to Amazon basics boots.. but far more people end up buying the cheap option because it's cheap and available.
It seems like fewer restrictions would mean more garbage getting built.
Bundling all regulation into a single monolith is a classic mistake.
Some regulations are bad. Some regulations are good.
The abundance types do not want to remove good regulations, like structural integrity or fire safety regs.
They want to remove bad regulations, like parking minimums or building height limits.
Please understand this very important distinction.
The restrictions, paradoxically, are what cause garbage! when the unit you build is in incredibly high demand, you do not have to build good quality, someone will pay you for it. If you are competing with other people building for the same rental market, you can't get away with that.
Depends on the restrictions. Not being allowed to cast a shadow on the neighbor’s zucchini garden or having to pay off permit expediters has no impact on building quality, mandating wood vs cardboard does.
Fewer regulatory roadblocks like zoning would lead to more supply, which would lead to more competition, which would lead to better quality and cheaper rents.
At least in cities, it will probably just lead to more high-end housing that's bought up by people who don't even live there. The market doesn't work with so much income inequality.
High end housing takes pressure off of moderately high end housing, which takes pressure off mid end housing... all the way down the line. Housing supply simply takes pressure off the cost of living for everyone.
The idea is that there will be more competition.
Well that's what they say, but it seems like there should already be enough competition for people to cause less garbage to be built, and it's not working, they just build it anyway.
My town has a bunch of half empty new buildings that are keeping their prices high instead of competing on price (they're also garbage construction, so they didn't compete on quality either). Apparently it makes more financial sense to the owner to keep empty units instead of competing because of the value of snagging a few tenants at higher rents or something.
More realistically: right now it can take years to get approval to build somewhere, only specific builds for specific places.
I had to break a lease on an apartment recently. The apartment was built in 2023 or 2024, marketed as a luxury apartment. We had no hot water for a month because they used a couple centralized tankless water heaters, and we happened to be the furthest away from the heaters - if they turned it too hot, it was burning hot for the apartments closer to it.
Not only that, but the walls/floors were paper thin. We could hear the floor creak when our upstairs neighbors so much as shifted their weight.
Don't you love the feeling when your neighbor from upstairs seemingly plays bowling while horseback riding? (Especially when you found out that in reality he just dropped a penny on the floor that acts like a megaphone.)
Rest assured, the quality has gone up, just not in ways that you, or most anyone, cares about. You'll be satisfied knowing that every house in the country is built with outlets every 12 feet, with independent circuits for the for every few hundred watts of lighting, able to withstand Arizona heat, California earthquakes, Florida hurricanes, Louisiana humidity, Minnesota cold, and everything else you may or more likely may not care about.
Inflated building code is a great way to repress the rate of new construction, and if it's all in the name of safety or energy conservation, no one can stop it, even if it's entirely useless for your house. That leaves low quality materials as the only ones affordable for a starter house.
Oh man, how much I agree on a building code.
The last hurricane I survived, I had to spend time in my office building. It is made of concrete and real brick and mortar. There is no need whatsoever to “hurricane-proof it", save for the special shatterproof windows. Big, 4 by 6 shatterproof windows.
The shoebox I live in currently features the same shatterproof windows. 2x1 feet, small windows. I had to re-install all the light fixtures in the rented house because despite featuring white walls, it’s darker than a necromancer’s cave.
The former was built in the 70s. The latter - in 2023. The latter does boast an impressive array of anti-hurricane features. For example, it is bolted down to the foundation so it can't be torn by a wind gust. And the frame was re-inforced so it won't lean under the wind.
Shall I mention the fact that none of those features are necessary for a brick building?
To top it off, the AC has leaked in 2024, so I had to deal with that already. It was less than 1 year old at that moment.
My parents bought a house in the mid 80's, that another family member currently lives in. It still has the original air conditioner, which is a heat pump, so it's run for 40+ summers and 40+ winters with minimal repairs and effectively zero maintenance.
Exactly. Qualiflation. We have substituted the inflation with the inflation of quality. Yes, the AC in 80x used to cost $2k, and thank pete, in the current market it costs only $2.5k. But if you compare the quality, you will get the idea that that old AC is about $15k right now, cause it was so damn good and unbreakable.
Apartments are either "small" or "luxury". No matter what you do, you get smeared for building housing.