I wonder when we will cross the post-scarcity point on housing. Considering that about 50% of my monthly expenses goes to rent, I think reducing the cost of housing is where most of my mental energies should be devoted, instead of yet another social/local CRUD app. My partial solution is Commodity Housing in urban areas, i.e., housing so abundant that what you pay is close to the maintainance costs, which I estimate would be on the order of $50-60/month (excluding electric/gas, water/sewage and garbage collection expenses which most of us already pay for separately). I can't seem to figure out why, when there is so much land in the U.S. [1], the rents are still so crushingly high [2]? I only have a partial answer in zoning laws and (ironically) rent controls [3].
As an expression of "a lot of land in the U.S.", you can buy a habitable dwelling in Nowhere Unincorporated, New Mexico for $100. Would you take this option?
My intuition suggests that the rents being so damn high is yet another case of the 1%, already rich, screwing the rest of us to maintain their cash flow. However, as the late John McCarthy cautioned, "he who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense" [1]. So, I'll need to do my arithmetic before jumping to this conclusion. Once I'm finished, I'll post an "Ask HN" question on this issue.
[1] Progress and its Sustainability, by John McCarthy
The availability of water is one of the limiting factors to the population density of a city. A lot of land implies large catchment areas over which to collect enough water to support a large city population.
Location still matters, or else there would be no such thing as startup hubs like silicon valley. I'm thinking more along the lines of...why is that outside of downtown SFO, most buildings are at most 2 stories high? Is it just due to prevailing zoning laws and rent controls or is there something more? There is obviously great demand for housing as indicated by the extremely high rents in this area, so why not just replicate the downtown high rises further south?
By the way this is what I found on a plaque next to the Golden Gate. The biggest faction opposed to building the bridge were the landlords in SFO, who feared that once the bridge was built, it would greatly lower the rents they could collect.
The thing about high rises is that they require money to put them up, especially in seismically active areas. Typically the cost is such that an apartment in a high rise takes at least several years to fully pay off when paying off a mortgage with payments of the equivalent of today's monthly market rent.
Relax regulations, clean out zoning, remove market controls, employ people on the black market, do the construction not-for-profit and you might be able to slash the cost by half or maybe two thirds, probably not more. (There is a finite amount of people willing to pay to live in such a high rise, but let's assume demand really is huge.)
In particular, even at that lower construction cost it won't be worth it for anyone to build if the rent is to be comparable to maintenance costs, whether through supply/demand or otherwise. This will be the case until you can put up high rises at a total cost of about $900-1200 per unit (roughly 15-20 times the monthly payment), no matter how many you can put up.
[1] http://persquaremile.com/2011/01/18/if-the-worlds-population....
[2] http://shine.yahoo.com/green/simple-life-in-manhattan-a-90-s....
http://financiallyfit.yahoo.com/finance/article-113345-10728....
[3] http://www.baycitizen.org/columns/elizabeth-lesly-stevens/sm....