alt Hacker NewsPretty 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.
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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.
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.
Apartments are either "small" or "luxury". No matter what you do, you get smeared for building housing.
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.