Was there a bubble or weirdness to the hotel industry that was ripe for disruption, like there was for taxis?
Tax arbitrage and homeowners' bizarre willingness to allow strangers to come into their homes while they are not there.
So it's mostly primary residences that are being rented out?
Around here, it's mostly not the owner's primary residence, but we also aren't particularly dense or expensive for wealthy people.
- On the San Francisco/New York/London side of density: is there an upper bound to density, given some minimum standard that middle-class Westerners have become accustomed to? I'm picturing stipulations that everyone has their own bed or one bed partner, bedrooms are meaningfully bigger if there's more than three children in a room, a kitchen and maybe a non-bedroom living space, depending on the number of people. Budgeted at or below 1/3 of a household income.
London is nowhere near maximum density, at least as far as housing stock is concerned. There's really very little high-rise residential construction compared to almost any other major city outside of Europe, though it is moderately dense across a wider area than most cities. Part of that is the weird sightlines rules, part is NIMBYism, part is a lack of investment in social housing and joined-up planning, part is the inability of the transport infrastructure to cope with increased population.
Not that I have one, but I wouldn't let strangers into my second home either. At least with proper tenants you know for sure where they live.
I think she means they are buying apartments and turning them into de facto hotel rooms. See your point about tax arbitrage.
I started looking up some stats about Somerville since that's the prototypical "dense without skyscrapers", 18k per sq mile vs. NYC 26k per sq mile vs. Manhattan 67k per sq mile. But then I found this great typo in a Slate article:
A population density of 18,000 per square foot should be perfectly compatible with spacious dwellings, ample parks, sidewalk cafes, at least some broad boulevards, and an office district.
I was just talking to Sifu Tweety this weekend about Somerville, which is somewhere in the teens for densest municipality in America, and it's largely single-family houses with yards. Micromanaging bedroom size isn't anything you need to make a community super-dense by American standards, you just need to allow multi-family housing without a ridiculous amount of parking, and allow single-family houses to be built on very small lots.
Yeah, I suppose I can't picture high-rises in London, now that you say that. I thought to include it because it's an example of unaffordable housing, mindlessly assuming there must be a high-rise center somewhere
The property tax structure here encouraged single-family houses on small lots. Until old people with fixed incomes and huge houses complained. Property taxes were based on the value of the land only, not the land plus structure.
The district I live in is ~25,000 people/km^2. Things work pretty well. It' mostly low-rise apartments 4-5 floors, slowly being replaced by taller buildings, 10-20 floors. I don't know what the net effect of those are on population density, because the buildings have bigger footprints and I think bigger apartments.
How big are the lots in Somerville?
I'm terrible at estimating by eye, but I just picked a random listing off Zillow, and the lot was 3,000 sq ft, which I figure is 50x60.
The building code sets minimum sizes, but they're much smaller than are actually being built. The 2015 ICC reduced the required area:
Every dwelling unit shall have at least one habitable room that shall have not less than 120 square feet (11 m2) of gross floor area. R304.2 Other Rooms. Other Habitable rooms shall have a floor area of not less than 70 square feet (6.5 m2).California removed the one room of 120 square feet requirement to allow for efficiency units and jump on the tiny home trend.
Zoning usually seems like a greater limiting factor. Often cities limit the lot coverage (particularly of detached homes and duplexes), require a certain amount of green space, limit building heights, etc.
If it's like Pittsburgh, it's probably more like 30' x 100', with the narrow end fronting the street. The houses are side-by-side that way, but set back from the street and with a usable yard in the back.
And I think road design has a surprising effect on density. You think of roads as lines of negligible width (or I do), but if you lay out an area with generally wide rather than narrow streets, you lose a whole lot of space.
Anecdotes:
Berlin had real problems with people renting in residential buildings with not-great sound insulation and noisy pukey temporary guests, so clamped down.
DC is running ads with a similar theme "neighborhoods are for neighbors"
I've rented a few times in Chicago-- once a speculator buying units in not-great lowrises and renting them, once a carriage house in one of Chicago's mixed single family and six-flat neighborhoods. Absentee owners are IMO the issue.
Pro rent: Neighborhoods need a tax base, buildings need maintenance, which is tough if most residents have no money. Anti rent: greedy absentee landlords drive out the locals, visitors behave badly. How to find a balance?
A small, squarish lot gets you a house with a bunch of planting beds on all sides, but no grassy area for kids or dog-pooping.
I think she means they are buying apartments and turning them into de facto hotel rooms. See your point about tax arbitrage.
Now that I think about it, I wonder if there isn't a mortgage arbitrage as well. If you do buy-to-let (I think you guys call it single family rental) here, you're supposed to do it under a different mortgage contract. In some ways the terms are "better" (eg interest-only), but they almost always carry a higher interest rate and are subject to different eligibility criteria. If you were doing Air BnB on an owner occupied mortgage (especially a super subsidised, barely any money down, American one), that would probably be quite an advantage against someone doing long term rentals by the books.
That's a good point. It's the same here. I feel better about it if they are also cheating the banks.
Unsurprisingly, there's a Vox explainer about why rents in Tokyo are low. I can't vouch for the accuracy myself.
On the main topic- AIHMHB this has been a major source of income for us in the last year. We get a few different types of renters:
- Groups in town for a conference or other event (e.g. rowing team for HOTC)
- Groups of kids traveling with a chaperone for cultural exchanges (a few from China so far)
- Extended families who want to stay together for travel or event e.g. graduation
- Couples/friends in town for partying/debauchery that they can't get away with in a hotel so they puke on our pillowcases.
Aside from the last group, they're all pretty responsible, and I think some attractive things are a group space not available in hotels, and cooking/cleaning facilities not available except maybe in extended stay hotels but even those suck compared to a normal house.
The way the economics work also favors sharing space, we have 5 bedrooms which, if it's couples who each share a bed, sleeps 10, plus we have a couple mattresses on the floor and an air mattress so we list at 14 max. Especially on busy weekends the price they pay us- $600-$700 a night- is still a bargain compared to getting 5-6 hotel rooms for the same number of people.
Even on the last type of renters we get some return, they left a few liters of whiskey, a couple cases of beer, a bong and a few grams of pot, and three THC gummy bears behind.
Our city has proposed limiting it to owner-occupied in smaller buildings. Single families renting out when they're away traveling, the original claim of the "sharing" economy pushed by AirBNB, has no effect on the rental market, other than it might increase purchases because that income could make carrying cost of a purchase easier. I don't think that's an effect that's worked its way into the market. It's when landlords with a lot of properties do short term rentals instead of long term that it reduces housing stock and pushes up prices of remaining rentals. In theory, though, the premium on short term rentals is offset by higher risk of going unoccupied and higher management effort. There's obviously seasonality, so even though e.g. we can make $8k/month in the spring and summer, in the winter we make little or nothing. If you average it to $4k/month that's not too much higher than we'd get from an annual lease.
How did you know what the gummy bears were dosed with? It could have been jicama and Salsaghetti?
21: That link doesn't mention key money, which is common and significant (over three months' rent).
They came in a convenient bottle that said "medicinal THC gummies" including a full analysis of the THC content (9.97mg/gummy)
Sorry, "up to" three months'. I think in Korea it can be a lot bigger.
25: That's good. "Let's try this food abandoned by the people who puke on our pillowcases" seems like a bad heuristic.
Oh, I did that too, they left some sliced meats and cheese in the fridge and a frozen pizza in the freezer.
Good thing I have some medicinal THC, I hear it fixes all kinds of diseases.
It's when landlords with a lot of properties do short term rentals instead of long term that it reduces housing stock and pushes up prices of remaining rentals.
This is exactly what I'm wondering - is this a meaningful phenomenon? Or is most of the fuss over NIMBYism?
Now that we're buried in the thread, I have another ATM!
Suppose one were on a planning committee and needed to be well-informed on Cat Cafes. Adjacent properties (sharing a wall) are very concerned about odor, etc, and everyone is generally skeptical of the premise.
How do these play out, in reality? Are they pleasant, if you like cats? Do they have a working business model? Apparently here they could serve pre-packaged to-go food only, which patrons can then eat on the premises if they so desire. Is the smell a problem?
I don't see why a place serving cats would smell any worse than one serving pork or beef.
I was completely unaware of the concept of a cat cafe until reading 32 and googling.
Unfogged: it's educational!
I don't know if anyone has matched up specific properties to compare if they used to be long term and are now short term rentals, but the sheer number listed suggests they have to be coming from somewhere and it's can't all be new construction. And of course there are always anecdotes about people whose lease wasn't renewed and then they saw their former home listed as a short term rental.
I'm sure the smell will be fine, but boiling cats scream shrilly as expanding air escapes through their claws.
It's funny -- generally I'm anti-Nimbyism. With short-term rentals, though, I feel as if there's a point to it. A few wouldn't make any difference, but if a substantial part of the housing in an area (how much? Dunno) is short term rentals, that's got to damage community structure, change what sort of retail can be supported locally, and so on. It seems like a legitimate negative for actual residents.
Goddammit Moby can I make one sick joke unpwned.
I looked at my neighborhood on airBNB and saw only a few listings. I don't think it will make much of a difference here.
Oh, sure, I bet there's a level at which it's harmless, but I also bet there's a level above which it isn't.
I went to a cat cafe in DC. It didn't smell at all, even inside. They're everywhere in Japan but I don't know if the business model is transferable here. The DC one had been open for a year I believe.
I'm INCREDIBLY annoyed that the state is making the decision on our behalf, either way. It is a deliberate FU to Austin, which has been tying themselves in knots on this.
32: In ours here, there is a short hallway with two sets of doors sealing the cat area's air from the cafe area's. You can bring cafe food into the cat area, but there appears to be separation otherwise. They have wall hand sanitizers which you're asked to use before entry; not, now that I think about it, before exit, and the exit is through the cafe, which may be a shortcoming. But I assume the employees/volunteers don't mingle between areas, or if they do, sanitize on the way.
Toxoplasmosis has been demonstrated to cause humans to want to start up cat cafes to facilitate transmission of the parasite. SCIENCE!
32: I have a friend who was interested and did a little research. The health code intersection is going to be tricky; they're smart for thinking about going the prepackaged food route. Coffee bars or similar are often suggested, but they'll really have to work carefully with county health to avoid problems.
I don't think cat litter smell from the cafe itself is going to be a huge issue, if they keep on top of it. (Say, clean the boxes each night as part of their closing procedures.) But when they take the litter out to the dumpster... that could be less good. I'd see if there's a viable solution, or ask the cafe how they intend to seal the litter before depositing it in the dumpster so it doesn't become a nuisance.
One thing to clarify is whether the cats will remain on site at night, or if they're brought in daily from an adoption agency (or similar). You might be able to define a required number of litter changeouts that correspond with the cat occupancy.
I could find out what the hell you people are talking about but I think my mental health will be better served if I just assume the Japanese all dine on cat.
8. The British and to some extent the Irish have a deep seated distrust of high rise living which is not reflected in any other European country I know of. To the extent that this has any rational basis it probably stems from the fact that a lot of incredibly ill-designed high rise buildings were thrown up with insufficient planning and some corruption in the 1960s and the descendants of people who encountered them acquired an allergy to the whole idea. In the last 30 years or so, many of these buildings have in fact been demolished, although people are tentatively trying to go there again, with a target market of young professionals.
32: Minivet's 43 has a great separation, and probably would reassure county health if they were doing hot food. You could require negative pressurization of the cat occupied rooms; that way smells and fresh air would all flow into the cat room, rather than out of it. (Hospitals do the same with soiled linen rooms.)
Then make sure that the exhaust air is treated before exhausting, or keep the exhaust rate high enough that dilution is sufficient--you don't want the exhaust to just spread the smell over the whole street!
heebie's question reminds me of a talk I saw from a Santa Cruz ethnographer and housing rights activist. The speaker told what to me were compelling stories of grad students and other long-term renters being turfed out of houses to make way for AirBnB; part, she argued, of what has made Santa Cruz one of the most expensive rental markets in the country.
But the thrust of her talk was about how in her research/activist experience at City Council meetings, moves to limit short-term rentals were constantly stymied by demands for hard data on heebie's question. And that data exists, so people want to wait for it--even those generally in favor of limiting short-term rentals. However, AirBnB is the only real source for that data and it's under no obligation to share (and has shown willingness to obfuscate or lie when, e.g. more powerful governments demand data). The existence of this tantalizing "dark data," the speaker argued, meant that a seemingly reasonable desire for sound science ended up being a powerful rhetorical strategy for the anti-regulation folks.
Not to judge heebie! And it's entirely possible that Santa Cruz is an outlier because of Bay Area/Silicon Valley horribleness combined with being a beach and university town.
The British and to some extent the Irish have a deep seated distrust of high rise living which is not reflected in any other European country I know of.
It may or may not be country-wide, but plenty of major European cities have even more restrictive building height rules than London or Dublin. Rome famously so, Paris until recently, Berlin, Munich, Barcelona, Stockholm.
a lot of incredibly ill-designed high rise buildings were thrown up with insufficient planning
Huh - is this the context of the Monty Python "Flats Built by Hypnosis" sketch, do you think?
Yes, and David Frost was doing sketches about it 5 years before that.
I always wondered what he did before interviewing Nixon.
50. Building height restrictions are largely beside the point if you can't persuade people to live in blocks more than three or four storeys high, and can't persuade anybody who can afford not to to live in flats at all.
Personally, I don't mind a row house, but I really like having my own door directly to the world and having nobody above/below me.
While I was in Dublin a chatty tour guide made the point that obvious historical reasons have caused to the Irish being temperamentally opposed to renting whenever possible, and vastly favor homeownership. A very cursory look at some data for Ireland and the UK mildly supports that: in 2011 Irish owner-occupation was at 71% (and had been 80% in 1991), while in the UK it's more like 66%, a rise from the recent past. That's closer than I would've thought.
Dublin is almost hilariously flat; the tallest building is 67m, which isn't even tall enough to be on the tallest buildings in Pittsburgh list--and some of those buildings are over a century old.
55: I think "row house" might be one of those regionalisms that means different things in different places. At home I have a door directly to the world and nobody above/below me, and we call it a rowhouse. IME the defining characteristic of a rowhouse is adjoining the neighboring houses - may be called a townhouse in some other places?
Right. If you're fancy, it's a townhouse.
Amusingly, of the ten tallest storeyed buildings in Ireland, only numbers #5 and #8 are in Dublin: of the remainder, 2 are in Cork and all the rest, including 1-3, are in Belfast.
57/8. Avoid confusion and call it a terrace house like normal people.
The Vox explainer linked in 21 seems a bit inadequate. It's correct about the relative lack of planning laws, but there is still a certain amount of zoning, particularly for height. In my old Osaka neighbourhood, for example, you couldn't build taller than three floors, and no building could have a footprint of more than 60% of the area of the plot.
What allows for constant building is that Tokyo doesn't have a green belt to curtail development, of the sort there is around London. Historically it's been pretty low-rise, as it's only in the last few decades that the technology has been developed to build tall buildings that won't collapse in an earthquake (the only skyscrapers previous to that were clustered in a small area of Tokyo with unusually stable geology). So you have a lot of relatively smaller condominium buildings with small to tiny apartments (the minimum size is mostly 25 square meters, though many wards now require developers to include a certain proportion of "family" apartments of 40 square meters), sprawling out over an immense area that's still expanding. Greater Tokyo is about the size of Wales, and still includes a lot of undeveloped land at its margins.
Another factor is that many Japanese don't want to live in an "old" house or apartment. The value of residential property has two components: the cost of the land, which goes up and down in line with the market but has been declining since the bubble burst in 1991, and the cost of the building, which depreciates like a used car. After 30 years, it's basically worthless - if you're selling a house, a building older than that is actually a drag on the value of the land, as it's assumed the buyer will have to shoulder the cost of demolishing it. For condominiums, the cost of the land is a tiny fraction if you're talking about a building with 50 apartments.
So there are a lot of postwar condominiums that have relatively low resale/rent value, while developers keep building new ones in the suburbs as those are what people who want to buy are looking for. Because of the low birth rate, there's also an increasing number of empty houses in Japan - I've seen an estimate that by 2033 one out of every three properties will be vacant.
Given that there's so many empty properties, and that the liberalization of the jobs market has eviscerated lifetime employment and meant that many people now in their 30s and 40s are still in insecure jobs that don't allow them to take out a mortgage, it's no wonder that both house prices and rents are static at best.
(If anyone is actually interested in Japanese housing, this blog is really excellent.)
I was confused by 55, too, until I reinterpreted "but" as "and" or "in part because." That may be inappropriate editorializing.
"Rowhouse" was the preferred term in my family, due to my mother's Philadelphia childhood.
I find "terrace house" mildly confusing because my gut reaction it to assume it means there's a roof-top garden, possibly on a split-level roof.
After 30 years, it's basically worthless - if you're selling a house, a building older than that is actually a drag on the value of the land
Crazy- our house turned 100 a couple years ago, and according to Zillow* it's worth 67% more than when we bought it 12.5 years ago near the bubble peak.
*Always an overestimate, but even going by city tax assessment it's appreciated 50% since 2004.
What allows for constant building is that Tokyo doesn't have a green belt to curtail development, of the sort there is around London.
Presumably also the immense amount of metro and commuter rail service, which goes hand in hand with new development?
65: I'm guessing wooden houses in subtropical climates age differently.
There's been reporting in both SF and NYC about this -- (for clarity) landlords buying up units and turning 'em into hotels. ISTR in NYC a guy getting sued by the city for doing this. Forget the details.
In SF,i it's been reported in the North Beach area. And yeah, in a tight rental market (small single-digit vacancy rate) I'd guess it can push up rents.
I can't not chime in on the Somerville aspects, can I?
Moby's right about the lot sizes - we have 3750 square feet, which is 37.5 feet wide (driveway next to the house) and 100 feet deep, with a house on it with a 20x35 footprint and a back yard.
"somewhere in the teens for densest municipality in America", per LB, is an interesting statistic because of how hugely it depends on exactly what you count. On this list, where Somerville is #16, only one entry on the list is NYC proper, but nine more of the top 20 are NYC-adjacent, and some are ridiculous things like East Newark, with 2400 people in 1/10th of a square mile. My mental rendering of the list is "NYC and environs, a couple of neighborhoods near LA and Miami, then Somerville". NYC is the only thing on the list that's denser than Somerville and also larger.
Zillow zestimates in my neighborhood seem to be really weird. Most are well below what I think is the rough market value (how much varies house to house in a weirdly random way), but as soon as they're put on the market the Zestimate immediately zooms up to much above what I think is the rough market value. I guess you can get Zillow to change it for you? Seems pretty useless.
66: Yes: fast, cheap, reliable, and safe commuter transport is essential to support that sort of model. New developments on the outskirts can be a 30-minute walk or more from the nearest station, though.
While looking into local population densities, I learned 14.4k people live in Downtown Pittsburgh, for a density of 22.5k/mi^2. When the hell did that happen? I thought there's hardly anyone who lives here, but maybe I'm still thinking with a last-decade mentality.
While you're looking at the densest municipalities list, check out #19, Poplar Hills, KY.
73: I don't know details but I think it's a historically black enclave in Louisville (defibitely on the in-Louisville part) but I'm not sure which side insisted on the segregation that made it separate from the larger municipality.
Paris proper comes in at 21,500/km2, roughly equivalent to Manhattan and the NJ suburbs of NY and roughly twice NYC as a whole.
Somerville is anomalous because Boston is relatively tiny. As a consequence, Boston city is the third most dense major city in the US. If Boston had an area more typical of a city its size, it would include Somerville.
Regarding short term rentals, hotel occupancy rates are setting new record highs this year. Apparently we haven't been building enough hotels to keep up with demand either.
The average standard of housing in the U.K. has been pretty terrible for ever. The terrible high rises of the 60s are matched by the barrat homes of the 80s and 90s.
Tom Slee has Airbnb data and code to analyze it.
62: Thanks for that blog, Ume.
78. But anything pre-WWII is probably fine and will last forever.
81: which is about 40% of the total housing stock.
40%? Impressive. I doubt more than 10% (maybe 20%) of US housing stock is pre-WWII. And we didn't even suffer from the effects of the war directly like you did.
Although our postwar housing may not be quite as terrible as yours. I don't know of any examples of buildings literally collapsing due to poor design.
What you lack in enemies foreign you make up in enemies domestic.
83: close. Apparently 13.5% of US housing was built before 1940. 39.2% of English housing was built before 1944 (therefore effectively pre-war, since there wasn't much housing going up during the war).
I don't know of any examples of buildings literally collapsing due to poor design.
Well, maybe not entire buildings but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyatt_Regency_walkway_collapse
http://www.nytimes.com/1990/01/11/nyregion/design-flaw-is-cited-in-school-collapse.html
As for the effects of The War, those may be less than you think.
Two million homes in the UK, including 1.2 million in London, were destroyed or damaged by air raids. First of all, that's only about 15% of the total housing stock.
And second, that "destroyed or damaged" can mean a lot of different things. Blast takes out windows first, so that will account for a lot of the two million "destroyed or damaged"; obviously houses that only lost windows will still be around today. If you're closer in, blast takes out doors and lifts slates or tiles off the roof. That makes a house temporarily uninhabitable, but, again, it's not going to be a complete loss. Air-dropped incendiaries start roof fires, and firefighting efforts soak floors and walls and take out windows and doors, but, again, that's recoverable if you start right away - and with very little new civilian building happening during the war, there was every reason to salvage all the housing stock you could and get it back into service as soon as possible.
Remember that, unlike the US housing stock, very little of the UK stock was wood-frame construction. (The British word for a habitation built entirely of wood is a "kennel".) So the housing was much more resilient to fire and blast than would have been the case in the US.
Interesting piece about postwar rebuilding here: https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/sep/02/blitz-london-bomb-sites-redevelopment
And here are some Bomb Damage Maps that illustrate my point. https://www.theguardian.com/cities/gallery/2015/sep/02/hand-coloured-bomb-damage-maps-london-in-pictures
See how much orange and yellow there is; that's "non-structural blast damage". Windows and doors and roof tiles gone. All that housing would have been back in service within days or weeks at most.
Further to 87.2: it's easy to forget just how thoroughly the UK economy changed during the war. There were no new civilian cars built between 1939 and 1945 - the entire automobile industry, which was sizeable, went over to military production. There was very little new civilian building (but a load of military construction). Even the cheese business was militarised; to optimise production and reduce the required workforce, local creameries were closed down and production was centralised in large creameries producing, for the sake of efficiency, only Cheddar, which had been designated the Official British Wartime Cheese. The UK was a much richer country than Germany to start with, and it militarised its economy much more thoroughly, which is how it was able to outproduce German industry every year of the war.
Cheddar, which had been designated the Official British Wartime Cheese
Clearly the US government is missing a trick. Imagine the marketing rights money they could be raking in. Eat Monterey Jack, the official cheese of Operation Enduring Freedom!
Every nation should have an Official Wartime Cheese.
"No Timmy, you can't eat that; that is the Official Wartime Cheese. We must await the Declaration."
That's a little surprising, isn't the production time on even mild cheddar considerably longer than other kinds? You'd think they wouldn't want a bunch of cheese sitting around aging during a war.
In 1950 the United States of America introduced its Official Police Action Cheese.
Wiki says mild cheddar is aged only for a month or two.
92: it is safe to assume that pretty much everything that happened in Britain between about 1919 and 1950 had something to do with John Maynard Keynes. I can only assume that Keynes really liked Cheddar.
Or possibly it was to prepare the population for a long war. Too many men had marched off to Flanders in 1914 confident that it would all be over before the Camembert had passed its peak.
On the other hand, I bet there were a lot of leaky, patched up buildings deteriorating in the weather.
Obviously, if you're going to have a single cheese for the duration, you want it to be Cheddar.
There are lots of fine cheeses in the world, but none have cheddar's combination of shelf-life and versatility.
Anyway, I read somewhere that the median age of construction for a house in Pittsburgh is sometime in the 1930s. Wood-frame houses aren't going to last centuries, but they can last a century if anybody wants them to.
re: 100
Plenty of centuries old wood frame houses in the UK.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bishops%27_House
The oldest wooden building in the UK is 1200 years old!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greensted_Church
I'd imagine (paging JRoth) you could do something with engineered timbers that'd be structurally as strong as the large oak cruck frames used on the remaining medieval wooden framed buildings, that'd be strong, long-lasting, and environmentally friendly.
Those are all pieces of history. There are plenty of ordinary (some really shitty) century-old frame houses in Pittsburgh being lived in. It can be hard to tell because people, in their continuing quest to make things worse, covered them with aluminum siding or asbestos shingles. Or both, plus a new layer of vinyl siding in the 90s.
You go to war with the cheese you have...
You go to war with the cheese you have...
ttaM's examples are allmuseum pieces, but they don't have to be. Here's a timber framed building from 1475 which is a perfectly ordinary pub. There are a lot more such in places like York and Chester. When my dad retired one of the retirement houses he looked at was a timber framed house from the mid 16th century, but he decided the cost of upkeep would be too much, so he bought a new build instead, and guess what?
Even in Japan, it's perfectly possible to build wooden houses that last for a century or more. There's several reasons for the 30-year figure, in addition to cheap construction and most people's preference for brand-new housing. One is that earthquake-resistance regulations have been upgraded several times over the past few decades, and it's generally cheaper to rebuild than to retrofit. Another is that the government wants to promote house-building as contributing to the economy, and some years ago came up with the figure of 30 years after which houses should be rebuilt (initially this was just the average age which houses were torn down, but it then became a self-fulfilling prophecy). That then fed into financial considerations, as banks calculate the value of a house according to its original price and nominal age and won't lend above the result of this calculation even if the house is actually in good condition. There's thus also no impetus for owners to carry out improvements to their homes that would increase their resale value, which feeds into the same vicious circle. And because most people who buy a house will live in it until old age, houses at the end of their lifespan tend not to have been maintained well for the final decade or three.
then became a self-fulfilling prophecy
Like the one that lead Voldemort to try to kill Harry Potter.
The phrase "timber framed" covers a pretty huge diversity of building methods; from things built out of huge baulks of seasoned oak like a wooden ship, through the US balloon frame thing, over to passivhaus stuff made from engineered timber cut with computer-controlled machine tools.
Or a masonry house surrounded by a copse of trees.
Given the housing prices in London, shouldn't somebody be building a whole bunch of shitty houses there? It seems like a better deal than a whole bunch of unaffordable houses.
Definitely cheddar is the cheese you want for long-lasting endurance. At summer camp we would do fairly long canoe trips, up to 12 days, and by the end your food supply was down to nuts, this brown bread we called football bread, and 1kg blocks of cheddar where you'd just scrape off any mold from the outside when you wanted to have a piece, the inside was perfectly fine with no refrigeration.
Hadn't your counselors ever heard of ramen?
111: they are. But the shitty houses (or, actually, flats) are also generally unaffordable.
I've heard people, people with a deeply-felt sense of grievance, complain that they could no longer rent a house for $1,200/month. And by "could no longer", they meant they would have to look in a perfectly safe, but uglier, street six blocks away.
I've also heard people tell me that if you cut the mold from the outside of the cheese and eat the inside, you're still eating mold. I don't believe those people.
It's the corollary of the five second rule, if you can't see the mold it's not there. Maybe it should be called the ostrich microbe rule.
The Mayo Clinic has a page answering the cheese question, but I can't get it to load.
re: 111/114
Also, the post crash changes to lending.
I _could_ afford to buy where we are.* But I can't afford to save up 50-100K _and_ pay rent and bills at the same time.
I do gloomily wonder, too, if the current property situation suits certain people (retired or near-retirement boomers) just fine. Like Brexit.
* modestly, would need to be a flat, not a house.
No need to wonder. Yes, yes it does.
Older people here (which for these purposes would include people my age and up) expect to be able to live in a house for a decade or more and sell it for a profit sufficient to be a down payment on a bigger house or (if much older than me) pay for their retirement. Which can only happen if the down payment is unaffordable for people buying their first house unless those first-time buyers have parental help or above-median earnings without student loans.
Of course, you don't need much of a down payment here. Everybody just forgot about the housing crash.
87,97, et seq: How much damage was there from inadequate repairs? Like, was there enough glass to fix windows? As I've just learned from Britain's War Machine* one of the first shortages was in wood.
*On Ajay's rec, for which my thanks.
Finally. I guess the Mayo Clinic thinks we all have huge amounts of cheddar to waste on not eating so much mold.
Huge blocks of cheddar are one of the few things I miss here.
123: good question: I don't know. Britain had a large and flourishing glass industry before and during the war; postwar a lot of glass mills shut down because of competition from overseas. And glass, at least relatively low-quality glass like you'd use for windows and bottles, was not a particularly strategic industry so I can't imagine there was a huge amount of competition for output. (Obviously you need high-quality optical glass for bombsights and binoculars and periscopes and things.) As for ingredients, I think they're all available locally.
But a lot of it went for export, and during and after the war glass sales were restricted in the home market under austerity rules.
Short term, though, you just board up the windows to keep the weather out.
I think maybe PPG was overseas competition. They now had a hockey arena named after them, thanks to Obama's War on Coal.
126/7 is what I figure; but OTOH there was very probably a shortage of skilled construction labor for civilians.
[quote]And glass, at least relatively low-quality glass like you'd use for windows and bottles, was not a particularly strategic industry so I can't imagine there was a huge amount of competition for output. [/quote]
Maybe competition for inputs (sand, limestone, energy)?
129: sure, but replacing broken windows isn't really skilled labour.
131: Sure. I'm thinking more roofs blown off, cracks in walls. Patchable and habitable, but really needing professional attention.
130: Energy use certainly mattered. But they could have imported, finished glass being quite low bulk.
132: Ah, OK. No idea on that. I mean, rehousing civilians was a priority after the war, for obvious reasons, hence the pre-fab houses; and so I would guess that repairing existing damaged housing would be a priority as well, because it would be much more cost-effective than building new ones? I don't know.
We'll be able to do a proper longitudinal study once Trump has evicted all the Mexicans.
131: Attitudes like that are why the glaziers voted Brexit.
Well, it isn't. Back in the 1940s it was just one of those things that you were supposed to know how to do. The glazier cut you a bit of glass the right size, and then you took it home and put it in yourself, with putty.
Now, because of double-glazed, gas-filled windows, they use that putty for cake icing. They call it "Fondant".
Pre-1940 double glazing was filled with coal gas, so it burned really easily.
Interestingly, only 22 buildings in Somerville could be built under its current zoning laws. All the other buildings have been grandfathered.
http://cityobservatory.org/the-illegal-city-of-somerville/
There are some buildings that are falling down. Look at the tower in San Francisco which is tilting horribly have been built on even ground. Also, they tore down a 9 year old, 25 story apartment building in Seattle that had unfixable problems.
http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/9-year-old-belltown-high-rise-too-flawed-to-fix/
.jpg){kind=link}