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mhornberger t1_j7qgjul wrote

Reply to comment by TimmJimmGrimm in New battery seems to offer it all: lithium-metal/lithium-air electrodes by nastratin

Housing could never come down as much as TVs have. But the current housing crisis is mainly because of zoning and other regulations that reserve land for single-family detached homes. We've allowed homeowners to block the building of density, to protect the spiraling value of their asset.

Suburbia doesn't scale well. And unfortunately a century of culture changes, television, etc has linked "the American Dream" with owning a single-family detached home. Which entrenched sprawl and car dependence. Plus people now view housing, even their own home, as an investment. Housing can't both be affordable and a good investment. Those are conflicting goals.

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TimmJimmGrimm t1_j7qko3y wrote

It is both weird and ironic that Canada (2nd largest country in the world, tops for softwood production) seems to suffer from a space and materials shortage.

You are right though: this struggle is political-economic. There are no laws restricting the number of televisions nor where-how we can build them ('some of it might be toxic, maybe?'). Construction has been regulated since medieval times (well... not in Canada so much, but you see what i am agreeing with here).

Still, it saddens me to see technology bonk its head against human stubbornness. We have had amazingly cheap straw housing for decades. Now we can obviously print them. Heck, Sears made pre-fab homes back in the 1970s (just looked into it - apparently a pre-fab saves on 'time' but not much 'money' - they still exist now). Land is also a problem because most countries have weird 'dead zones'. The Canadian shield, for example, can't sustain much life (it is a large smooth rock with a few tragic weeds growing on it). Amazing place to build a house, tragically no one could live there.

It is a weird battle. It appears we are solving every aspect of living (heating, food, lighting, insulation, circulation of air and fluids, etc) and yet we still can't find a space to live. That's just upsetting.

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mhornberger t1_j7qnnml wrote

Well our housing standards also went up. We could throw up dirt-floor tarpaper shacks with no electricity or plumbing tomorrow, but no one would consider that "real" housing. We used to have single-room occupancy housing, rooming houses, bunk-houses etc that did serve the poor. They've been banned by zoning and NIMBYs, which increases the housing crisis. But even when I advocate for these to be built, people say "that's not real housing!"

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TimmJimmGrimm t1_j7sfmd7 wrote

This is a really nifty point. The houses went to a solid middle class standard but the wages went nowhere in four decades, effectively pricing people out of their own homes.

Well put, but i am surprised that i haven't seen this before.

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mhornberger t1_j7shcyh wrote

Houses have also gotten much larger. If you compare price per square foot, the increase in price isn't as great. But our expectations have gone up, faster than our income.

Per that last link:

>>On a per square foot basis using median home prices and median square footage, the inflation-adjusted price of new homes has been relatively stable since 1973

So our houses are larger, better insulated, etc. Our standards have gone up. But our income hasn't gone up nearly as much.

I think there's a similar issue with childcare, another big issue. When I was a kid, childcare was a random teenager. Plus I was frequently home by myself, at an age where that would be illegal today. But now childcare workers get paid more, are CPR trained, insured, etc. Plus we have more expectation that childcare be enriching, rather than the kid being dumped in front of the television.

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TimmJimmGrimm t1_j7t9gmt wrote

This is wild: i cannot imagine ANY home in the Vancouver BC mainland area. They were horribly expensive decades ago and this went crazy. You are right though: there are houses that are considered 'heritage' and they are very much cottage sized.

Nifty take on childcare-inflation. That also goes along with eduction inflation - everyone is expected to have at least one degree to be a 'professional'. I wonder how else the workforce changed besides the elimination of most farmers and weird shifts in trades.

One of the things they mentioned in problems with pre-fab houses, they noticed that having a 'Big Room' was hard to build and ship in factories. So what they did was combination building: they would have all the small rooms pre-fab built and the large room would be built on-site by the trades.

I wonder if this is why pre-fab homes are less popular. It is just harder to build these mega homes ('made up entirely of large rooms') with pre-fab, so collectively people gave up on them.

Must get to bed... but lots of stuff to mull on. Thank you.

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