There is far more money to be made in housing than rocket launches. The reason there is no Elon Musk of housing is that it is several orders of magnitude harder than rockets.
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I still believe that homelessness could be solved if we just had the political will and money to do it. One benevolent billionaire could make a huge difference, but that kind of altruism seems to run afoul of the character traits required to amass obscene wealth.
1. The "Elon musk of [whatever]" is a very loaded concept, making it ripe for discourse. 2. Hank's posted this kind of discourse-encouraging post on threads and Twitter and here, in order to compare engagement numbers, like 5 times in a row.
Thanks for elaborating. I'm definitely sold on part 2, but idk, isn't discourse about things that matter generally a good thing? Granted that a 300-character-limit quickpost network isn't necessarily an ideal platform for depth or nuance. :D
Blackstone is one of the largest owners of single family rental homes in the US, and they’re often outbidding individual buyers. This raises serious concerns about housing affordability and availability, especially for first time homebuyers. I’d rather not see this trend continue.
Wait didn't he claim to have some sort of Tesla Home Pod bullshit to disrupt the housing something by re-inventing the prefab singlewide but for tech bros? Sorta like how he reinvented the subway by putting taxis in tunnels
That's a kdrama plot btw: Entrepreneur buys restricted land for cheap. Then bribes local politicians to lift restriction. Politician sells it to the public as more housing needed. Entrepreneur profits.
it's harder but I also think it's difficult to truly gauge what a billionaire is capable of doing purely through money. a theoretically good billionaire could subsidize a small housing project literally forever if they wanted to
As a housing nerd, I don't think this is right. The work is broadly understood, and when it's not kept down by exclusionary regs, barriers to entry are fairly low. That means there's a lot of money overall, but the profits per individual business are (ideally) relatively low. They compete, we win
There are exceptions; one is modular apartment buildings. That takes a lot of capital & most in the US have failed at it, someone rich & smart might make a pile. But we really need HUD facilitating it systemically. & it's not FAANG scale piles
Yeah I was about to say. Stop giving housing moguls credit, they have it all figured out. Less housing = quicker profit. It's literally boiled down to a casino game where you win more if you have more money.
Not quite. The developers are & were not the drivers of exclusionary policy. It drove many of them into different lines of business; the behemoths remaining are those who had the wealth & connections needed to thrive in the market environment "neighborhood activists" created
Working in landlord/tenant law is a real eye opener in how complex an area this is. Like, it definitely hasn't made me pro-landlord, but I've definitely had cases where everybody involved was honestly doing their best, and cases where everyone was the villain.
The reason there is no Musk of housing is because housing isn't flashy and doesn't get eyeballs on him. He flushed billions to buy Twitter so everyone would be forced to listen to him.
We build up and below is where we work. Make it as phallus shaped as possible. Maybe double domes at the bottom for fun events for the spe…I mean humans.
No hate, but like, isn't the problem that there are already people making "so much money" in housing? I can barely afford my rent and there's 80 units in this building.
Secondly, what does an "Elon musk of of housing" look like. What are they doing or accomplishing? Conning the govt out of public $?
Elon Musk deserves no credit for SpaceX, all of that work was done by engineers who's names you don't know. That being said, I do agree with the sentiment.
There’s a lot of debate in the comments whether this should be a non-profit venture or gov’t subsidized. I say neither. We need someone to create the Walmart of housing. Cheap homes built en masse that can sell a large volume. The fact that there’s not currently a sub $100k option is ridiculous.
And it's because unlike rockets, electric cars and air hockey tables, housing isn't one of those fields that excites the imagination of the average 9-year-old.
Okay but SpaceX’ role in our national capability shouldn’t be understated as something that is only there to ‘excite the imagination of the average 9 year old’
I fear that this attitude leads to a doomer mentality towards the problem. It is a complex situation, but lots of complex problems can be solved easier than going to Mars.
Yeah that's all we need is another billionaire gentrifying the housing industry putting more families on the street, i hate flippers for high profit. That's cause i detest capitalism and the dog eats dog existentiality.
I know space exploration is important and such but can we please stop giving him money. If people like him paid an appropriate level of taxes nasa would be properly funded.
Not remotely an Elon defender hut I’m not sure this argument holds up. The vast majority of his wealth is Tesla stock, which is largely based on intangible speculations of their future innovations. Tech scales a lot faster and more cheaply than housing too. It’s more that tech is cheap than easy.
He already is the “Elon Musk of housing”. He explicitly wants to develop neo-feudal separatist enclaves. His solution to the housing crisis is serfdom.
Solving engineering problems is more fun that solving political problems. Even the people who work in politics and are good at solving political problems (whatever that means) find the work challenging and sometimes unrewarding.
There’s a lot of ground game to housing. You can park a lot of money in housing investments, but if you want to rent them out you also run a lot of overhead in upkeep. So it’s inherently a rich person’s game. Easy to keep the wealth you have, hard to build wealth out of.
To be fair, it’s because the housing shortage exists because it’s what most voters want. Most voters own their home and mostly drive. They would rather have lots of parking and easy commutes rather than new neighbors, and they also want their home prices to go up. It’s a political problem.
Hey Hank, you should reach out to Hasan Piker to have a discussion on his stream! I'm certain he'd love talking with you, he's extremely charitable and knows how to have a discussion. Chat is probably somewhat fond of you too, despite ideological differences. you taught us science!
I used to respect Musk. Not anymore. When I learned he made his money buying companies and treating his employees like slave labor, he's as much a fraud as Trump.
I personally think we should be encouraging him to pursue Mars colonization and have the UN agree to give him and his heirs permanent possession of Mars if he can begin a colony before 2030 and stay there for 5 years.
What about all the empty housing that currently exists? And the homeless that live on the street? Doesn’t seem we need more houses, we need to fix this corrupt capitalist system and fund our People instead of other countries.
One good approach to solve housing would be to change zoning rules for more dense urban development in metropolitan areas.
Another good approach would be to somehow incentivize parents to move out of houses after the children have moved out, thereby raising supply for that type of housing.
Ha ha he got banned for life
If he was the Elon musk of housing he would of been picked as Xi Jinping successor despite being Spanish (I know he’s not but Elon musk is not American so)
I really wish SpaceX could finally wriggle away from association with Elon Musk. There are really good engineers doing really good and impactful work there, but it all gets tarnished by Elon’s insanity
My understanding is a significant chunk of our housing problems could be alleviated by relaxing zoning regs re: what *kind* of housing is allowed in what areas.
That seems fairly simple.
Unless the difficulty you're referring to is convincing locals to be ok with big apartments.
That *is* v hard.
The reason there is no Elon of housing is because contractors are largely small regional companies, and if they were to be conglomerated into one massive company we would see the quality of our homes go down even more and the costs go up even higher. I actually don’t think we need an Elon of housing
Alternatively, one could monopolize property ownership which would be even more problematic. Property distribution is super important to a healthy economy. If one person owns everything, it is no different than the government owning everything. Both are a dystopian nightmare
Why reduce scarcity to help people when they could just collude to make the prices unsustainable for renters and/or cost prohibiting for new buyers? How else are non-human entities supposed to hoard resources vital to a dignified survival? Think of the hedge funds Hank! Their profits!
wholly unrelated, but do you know why people who get motion sickness from video games a) aren’t affected by all games and/or b) aren’t even always affected by a game that causes it sometimes? Asking for a friend 🤢
People will get way more upset if a house isn't built right and blows up. Rockets can explode or crash dramatically an still be considered successful, houses not so much.
Shameless plug for https://strongtowns.org, the best way we can start to turn this around is by organizing at the local level and encouraging healthy development practices and good urban design.
Musk has found this out the hard way: He dipped a toe into a tiny corner of housing, with the Solar Roofs project. He learned the hard way that the variety of local ordinances you had to adapt to was more than he was willing to wrangle.
It would be about actually helping people, not just about enriching himself - his goal is not to make everyone‘s lives better but to be in front of cameras doing pseudo Sci-Fi stuff AND enrich himself.
Musk has one goal: preventing our extinction. So, rockets (and electric cars). Making money and weakening gov't are just means to his all-important goal. To be The Musk of Housing you'd have to believe that housing is the most important issue in human history.
And it doesn't get you people praising and gushing over you and telling you how much of a genius you are. Which is all Musk really wants at the end of the day.
now we just need to undo all the various crap which has prevented us from constructing the nice 3- and 6-flat buildings that dot older parts of practically every town around where I live but for *some reason* we have decided don't deserve to be built anymore.
To illustrate your point, this is San Francisco overlooking Golden Gate Park. Imagine if the city allowed just a single additional story to be built on this sea of homes.
Yeah, even just opening up ADUs on most residential lots could add a ton of housing. But we all know it’s not about space—it’s about “preserving the character of the neighborhood.”
local board denied changing a small lot in our neighborhood thats been left alone for 30yrs, because they refused to build allow dozen townhomes that would have allowed for an aging parent to live closer to their family locally. Because "what ifs"... Now the HOA pays for maintenance on an empty lot.
One thing I've been hearing about occasionally lately is the effort to ease the standard (in the US) IBC requirements for 2 means of egress in certain smaller size multifamily residential buildings, because it forces them into less desirable designs for end users.
As an architect, the 2 means of egress thing has been ingrained into my psyche for ages, but its does seem like many European cities do a fine job of creating safe housing with only 1 egress. I've never worked on residential design, so I can't opine much more than that, but its an interesting idea.
(can't recall now who in my architect-o-sphere I've heard about this from, but maybe also from non-architects? apologies if I'm forgetting that you posted on this?)
Mike Eliason of Larch Lab is an architect I know of who has really tried to promote changing the building code in the US to allow for more point entry blocks in the european style
This really isn't worth quibbling over but fwiw I'm talking about much smaller builds than what's in the thumbnail - the missing middle which could triple or sextuple the density of today's single-family zoned areas in places people want to live but can't afford to.
I am aware of this issue and posted some thoughts about whether fire sprinklers (which are cheap and common enough that they're required in my area for *townhomes* and have been for several decades) should be seen as a reason to nix the double-exit requirement but never got a satisfactory answer.
And by that I mean, I got *an* answer (the people who write the egress codes are often the same people who regulate fire sprinklers so you'd sort of have to convince them of their own cognitive dissonance re: necessity of dual-egress) but also there are many more solutions than just sprinklers.
Can we skip ahead to the point where he starts ladeling out the Kool Aid and/or Flavor Aid* to the faithful?
* There's evidence, pictures and boxes, of both having been at the compound at various times, and it's not known which got used for the final batch, so don't @ me.
I mean.... with the world heating up.... underground housing development that isn't just rich people bunkers sounds like it might actually be a good idea lol
Also, the lower we go the harder it becomes to deal with waste. A lot of waste treatment relies on pipe slope using gravity to keep things moving in the correct direction.
A short term move underground might one day be a stopgap between the progress of climate change and our ability to solve it, either by reversing or escaping it. Either way, underground is cooler than the surface and a shelter from the elements.
It'll only be temporary. The London underground is becoming unbearably hot after the century plus of the system continuously warming the surrounding ground.
Also the margins are already tight. Rockets had room to do better. This is why tunneling isn't working for Musk, it looks like Rockets 2.0 on paper but its actually closer to Housing 2.0 - the reason why ? - it already had competition.
We built our daughter a small starter house 2 yrs ago. $14k for permits alone. Tons of paperwork and time spent just getting permission to build. I understand why, but it adds a level of expense and complexity that excludes a lot of people from taking that route.
The really dumb part is that 90% of the difficulty is self imposed by our system that decided somewhere along the way that home ownership would be the primary vehicle for creating family wealth.
As houses have become so unbelievably expensive, a home is the majority of the wealth accumulated by middle and lower income families (and those who don’t own their home often have much less wealth). Homeowners therefore often vote/attend planning meetings with the goal of preserving that wealth.
And since anything that would lower the cost of housing would eat away at that wealth (since it is, in fact, just housing), they rarely support things that will increase the affordability of housing.
Like, the difficulty of building rockets is engineering, and physics, and money.
The difficulty in building housing is a bunch of your neighbors who would rather consider homelessness someone else’s problem than risk their investment losing value.
I don't think housing is difficult if you don't place the onus on one person to solve it. It is a cultural and political problem and other countries with fewer land resources have solved it.
I worked for one of the largest affordable housing non profits in the country. It is incredibly hard. Expanding the 50 unit senior housing I managed to 88 units took 15 years of zoning battles. And that’s not even touching on tracking down the funding, getting approved for LIHTC credits, etc.
Again it shouldn't be on a non profit to resolve this issue. The municipal and state govts need to act on these issues. Speaking from Canada, with similar challenges.
Local govts barely have the money to keep the potholes filled and the parks open. States aren't much better off. The federal govt is behind much of the money non-profits use to build housing. And Imma guess we're not going to see a lot of that in the next, oh, four or so years.
I mean, the "somewhere along the way" was a *long* time ago. Millennia? The Romans and Greeks had a concept of individual real estate, and for ages your "King" was just the owner of the land you lived on; who definitely used that ownership as the primary vehicle for creating his family's wealth.
Not enough of a historian to know the details but at least in the US, I don’t think land was a particularly good store of wealth until relatively recently (like, post Great Depression).
It ebbs and flows. But the Civil War was mostly a war caused because Southern landowners' wealth (tied to their plantations) was about to take a major hit. The Oklahoma Land Rush of 1889 was partially an attempt to stimulate the US economy because it was an effective driver of wealth. Meaning...
Yeah, I’m not arguing that land ownership wasn’t tied to wealth, I’m saying that the average family didn’t see home ownership as their primary way of building wealth. Most of those 19th century land rushes were about agriculture or resource extraction.
Ah, I see what you're saying. Though I contend that, prior to the Industrial Revolution, there wasn't a distinction: your home and workplace were the same location, so the value of your home was tied up in what it could produce.
That's the same today, though speculatively rather than productively.
...that in the late 19th Century, land (and its use) was enough of a commodity that it was worth enslaving, trafficking, killing, and relocating both Black and Native peoples; and that millions were willing to go to war to maintain their land's value (or even just the hope of it).
To be clear: I'm not trying to assert that it's *not* a problem, just that it's not a *recent* problem; and also a little bit of a "but it's also more complicated than that." Which I think goes to Hank's original point. Any one root cause or fix just isn't sufficient.
The United States was founded around a time when that concept was being significantly more democratized, and in fact is bound up in democracy as a concept (remember, only land-owning men could vote in the US originally).
I think that the problem is less about holding your wealth within a home or estate, and more about hoarding multiple homes or estates, holding them hostage at onerous rents when there are others who need them.
That is also a problem but it isn’t as tied to the lack of new construction outside of maybe a few high-cost areas. It’s usually down to local board meetings that are overrun by local NIMBY land owners convinced that development will always be more bad than good.
Oh absolutely the NIMBYs are a big problem. But I'm not entirely convinced that's about property value as much as it is about "but I don't WANT to look out my window and see a big apartment building being there!"
They just say "property value" so that it sounds less whiny.
There's a lot of people trying to be though. Like all the 3D printing housing companies and "modern" modular house companies like boxabl. Unlikely any fully succeed in that goal but there are people trying to innovate in the housing market
The housing issues are largely an issue of complexity as you talked about in your video today. From title companies, brokerages, realtors, builders and to some extent the construction trades themselves there are a ton of issues.
I believe this is solvable all while building higher performant and more sustainable. When you pivot the focus towards education, community and creating experiences I think it can change the tide to bring a lot of the bad actors inline.
I don't believe the solution is to bringing tech in to help with comms, but rather simplify and change the system. A system that biases itself towards enabling the community to learn and participate all while cutting out the communication issues currently going on.
You're wrong. In the short term there might be loads more money in it, but in the long term it would hurt capital. The purpose of a system is what it does, and what the American system does is keep people perpetually poor to exploit them. If people have housing they are less exploitable.
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Which Elon is actively trying to get rid of.
Secondly, what does an "Elon musk of of housing" look like. What are they doing or accomplishing? Conning the govt out of public $?
The solution is public housing
Another good approach would be to somehow incentivize parents to move out of houses after the children have moved out, thereby raising supply for that type of housing.
If he was the Elon musk of housing he would of been picked as Xi Jinping successor despite being Spanish (I know he’s not but Elon musk is not American so)
That seems fairly simple.
Unless the difficulty you're referring to is convincing locals to be ok with big apartments.
That *is* v hard.
* There's evidence, pictures and boxes, of both having been at the compound at various times, and it's not known which got used for the final batch, so don't @ me.
(he would only build rich people bunkers)
I still need to watch that!
The difficulty in building housing is a bunch of your neighbors who would rather consider homelessness someone else’s problem than risk their investment losing value.
I don't think housing is difficult if you don't place the onus on one person to solve it. It is a cultural and political problem and other countries with fewer land resources have solved it.
That's the same today, though speculatively rather than productively.
They just say "property value" so that it sounds less whiny.
We just need to understand how things work.
https://bsky.app/profile/bumblingbard42.bsky.social/post/3lbfyayokh22n
Most of the issues revolve around communication.
Not everyone agrees on the laws of zoning and permitting.