Thanks for being up for having this conversation in comments! Sorry for the slow response; I just got back to proper internet after several days on an island.
As I’ve said before, if political solutions were viable then this would have been solved 5+ years ago.
I still think dramatic improvement is possible via the political process for two main reasons:
The higher rents get, the more pressure there is to fix this. While it wasn’t great five years ago, it’s much worse now. As terrible housing policy continues expanding the number of people it affects, it’s easier to build support for measures to fix it.
Housing coalitions are shifting, YIMBY is growing, and the idea that we can make things better by building more is spreading.
I think we should continue trying to build this support.
Find ways to increase the quality of the average grouphouse so more people want to live in them. … if you found a way to increase the efficiency of a grouphouse bedroom so everything that would usually take 150ft2 can be done in 75ft2 without throwing important considerations under the bus, someone would only need to rent half as much room to maintain the same quality of life
I think this could be a decent solution for many young relatively well off single people without kids, who live primarily digital lives. While this is a demographic we know many people in, it’s only a very small slice of the people affected by the housing crisis. Separately, since different people have different preferences and constraints I suspect most people who would have the time, energy, and inclination to build something like this would actually want to customize it more for their situation. Which is fine! Your design can still be useful even if most builders use it as a jumping-off point; you don’t need interchangeable parts.
If people really did have generally similar preferences here you could build this in your apartment, and then when you moved you could sell it to the incoming tenant and leave it there. But if you actually tried this, even in a city like SF with tons of people in the target demographic, I expect pretty much everyone would ask you to bring it with you, even if you offered it for free. Similarly, if this were a large improvement over the kinds of loft systems you can already buy from IKEA I would expect you to be able to sell these to the general public, but again I don’t think it would be very popular.
Coordinate groups of people to move from NIMBY cities with 10⁄10 jobs and 10⁄10 house prices to YIMBY cities with 8⁄10 jobs but 3⁄10 house prices.
I’m also not sure where you’re getting “8/10 jobs”; I think the benefits of being in the top city for your field are usually much higher than 25%, more like 50% to 300%.
Thanks for being up for having this conversation in comments! Sorry for the slow response; I just got back to proper internet after several days on an island.
I still think dramatic improvement is possible via the political process for two main reasons:
The higher rents get, the more pressure there is to fix this. While it wasn’t great five years ago, it’s much worse now. As terrible housing policy continues expanding the number of people it affects, it’s easier to build support for measures to fix it.
Housing coalitions are shifting, YIMBY is growing, and the idea that we can make things better by building more is spreading.
I think we should continue trying to build this support.
I think this could be a decent solution for many young relatively well off single people without kids, who live primarily digital lives. While this is a demographic we know many people in, it’s only a very small slice of the people affected by the housing crisis. Separately, since different people have different preferences and constraints I suspect most people who would have the time, energy, and inclination to build something like this would actually want to customize it more for their situation. Which is fine! Your design can still be useful even if most builders use it as a jumping-off point; you don’t need interchangeable parts.
If people really did have generally similar preferences here you could build this in your apartment, and then when you moved you could sell it to the incoming tenant and leave it there. But if you actually tried this, even in a city like SF with tons of people in the target demographic, I expect pretty much everyone would ask you to bring it with you, even if you offered it for free. Similarly, if this were a large improvement over the kinds of loft systems you can already buy from IKEA I would expect you to be able to sell these to the general public, but again I don’t think it would be very popular.
I think this is likely to lose too much of what people value about being in those cities.
I’m also not sure where you’re getting “8/10 jobs”; I think the benefits of being in the top city for your field are usually much higher than 25%, more like 50% to 300%.