If you are interested, here's my new personal channel. kzfaq.info/get/bejne/nppip66Es9Ovc30.html

The fact that they built that in 15-19 days is mind blowing.

Very good video! As an economist I am glad that you pointed out that this is far from an engineering problem. In all major Western cities there is an entrenched class of people who don't want their cities to change. They like the way things are and they have long ago voted for policies such as height restrictions, restrictions on how voluminous a building can be and minimum restrictions on the size of new housing units. These policies essentially prevents new people from moving in while increasing market value of the existing property. This is a political problem not an engineering problem.

I'm glad you mentioned how politicians and bureaucrats makes everything costlier, harder and overrall less efficient.

*I propose a solution:* If we had a set of open source construction plans, of the very well designed 10+ level apartment buildings that companies can pre-build in a factory. Then get a permit faster, because the design is already well made and generally accepted as a good design for a very livable building. It would be much more easy for construction, if there was a set of good construction designs that are free to use and do not require planing and designing from scratch for every apartment building. The design of the apartment tower could be based on the movement of the sun, the wind and the trees that people want to have around the building.

Fantastic seeing someone talk about these issues in Dublin. Just finished college in DCU and I'm not looking forward to finding a proper place...

Why is Dublin so big? Cause it keeps on doubling!

China: takes 19 days to build a skyscraper England: Takes 2 weeks to put some scaffolding on a small 3 storey apartment block :/

During my college days, I recall learning about the down side of prefabricated modules in building. You have essentially the same structure repeated on each floor making the force distribution extremely focused. It would be very easy to cascade and cause failure on those points, like the whole corner of the building failing. (And it has happened before) A way to prevent this is lay the floors alternatively, but I don't see the China company doing so.

You're not helping, Brian. Every time you upload a video, you bring the house down!

I swear I could listen to you reading the dictionary. Quality Content + phenomenal presentation = The perfect channel. Love to see your channel growing, never stop

Mixed use building would be nice. Imagine going a few floors down from your room to go to work, then a few more floors for shopping or entertainment. No need for cars or car parks or wide highways. Less pollution too

I think this has been the most eloquent and solution-seeking comment section I have ever seen. All the comments are very insightful and share something about how things are in their respective cities. Fantastic job guys.

9:40 I wonder what a homeless person who might very much like to sleep on that bench thinks of the statue of a homeless person sleeping on the bench. But there is enough room for someone to sit. It's also a metal bench with gaps between the slats (a cold bench to stay on for too long). Hostile architecture in the guise of a compassionate reminder. The levels of irony there is unreal.

1:20 Is that seriously a Burger King above a Swarovski crystal store?!

In seattle, a paramedic needs to work 70 hours a week at the current wage paid by the local employers just to afford a one bedroom apartment.

Yah, I live in Lithuania. My life spins around two places: my hometown where I grew up and my mum lives and my university city, where I work, learn and have a girlfriend. I live in a student dorm, but rent prices are high considering income and lack of jobs. I am 27 and still have no place of my own. My classmates, who are younger, but still about mid twenties live with their parents as well.

Thanos has a much simpler solution.

I love that I can live in my parents house till I'm 30, I also really love that I won't have a choice

2020: Hold my beer.

2020: I help with that. you work from home now!, go back to village....

By constantly producing settlers and expand before the Sewer technology or Neighborhood civic is unlocked.

I notice and appreciate the little improvements in animation you have been making. The transition from side view to floor plan on the Taipei 101 and Shard was slick.

The housing crisis in Amsterdam can greatly reduced or even solved, by building a new wooden story of op of every roof of every building. Wood is light and cheap. Amsterdam needs 20.000 new homes, on a population of 872.922 inhabitants.

Watched this back in 2018, now rewatching in 2022.... oh, if only I knew 4 years ago how much the housing crisis would get worse

Machine learning really won't help when the problem is greedy people. Unless you're thinking of Skynet. The housing problem exists because we created it. We could solve it whenever we have the political will.

I'm a real estate agent, and I'm caught up in this on a day-to-day basis. It's interesting to see the difference between how urban sprawl works in the United States versus Europe. In Paris for instance, there's a wide area of 8 story buildings but not a lot of skyscrapers, the entire urban area is filled with mid-rises. Meanwhile in the most populated cities in America, we have an urban core with a few very tall buildings but a very short walk from there we're back down to two story private houses on little yards. A lot of it has to do with prevailing legendary status that the privately owned home on a little piece of land has in the American psyche. Ann Arbor Michigan is a place where I do most of my work, and it's almost a tiny San Francisco. It's nightmarish right now because almost nobody's coming to Market to sell but at the same time people are bidding up house prices to ridiculous levels.

Im not an expert, but bigger buildings means more people and that means more infrastructure needed. More sewage, water, bigger streets, more energy. Most cities are not prepared to grow so much Thats why urbanistic design is so important

A bit disappointed you didn't talk about decommodifying housing, but otherwise fantastic information.

I've long thought that a "Mixed Zone Development-Transit Corridor" will be one of the best ways to address housing, work space, and transit going forward. Rather than having a dense downtown core that extends in a radius, shift it to a focus on building up along the lines that commuters travel from bedroom communities. As the density rises cities and regional governments can justify the expense of more concentrated mass transit that has the greatest chance of impacting a larger portion of the population. Ensure planning allows and encourages not only for residential, retail, and office space is developed within reasonable distances to each other (whether mixed use buildings with retail-commercial-residential stacked upward, or merely encouraging collaborative developments between nearby properties) but of mixed value so that reasonably affordable boat like 'micro apartments' are within the same geographical area as high end penthouses, and a city will have gone a long way towards addressing the issues that put so much pressure on local economics. Restrictive zones of 'all the houses over there', 'all the office type things here', and 'all the shops in these central mall zones' make it needlessly hard to live near where you work and shop, and greatly extend travel requirements. Over time you can begin linking urban centres with these transit corridors, sharing related infrastructure between local public transit, local express, and regional transit. The smaller 'bedroom' communities can be encouraged to develop park-and-ride focused nets that feed into the central corridors.

What worries me about the housing crisis is that everyone only talks in terms of having housing whatsoever. I think the real problem is humane housing. Too many people accept single room apartments, which is where they sleep, eat, receive guests and work. And we know that makes people less economic with their choices, because it make people want to eat out and be unable to separate working time from sleeping time from leisure time. We need at least 4 rooms, I think. One place to sleep, one place to cook, one place to have leisure and one place to develop and apply skill. Otherwise, we tend to delegate one of these four domains to a second place. Like Starbucks. The pub. The casino. The office. And that costs far more money. Because of this, the population is forced through cheap apartments like a funnel, putting just as many people back on the queue as have left it each time an apartment gets a new owner. This keeps standards of living low, rent high and people from earning enough money to pay for the more expensive apartments. If people who got an apartment were more likely to want to stay put, less time would be wasted mediating between people who desperately need shelter at all and those who need an apartment that fits their class. TLDR: People are spending above their class because they are living below their class. The demand rises, because people are forced to accept subpar housing and therefore don't actually leave the housing market.

The main issue is zoning regulations. And all the NIMBYs that get their pitchforks out whenever somebody suggests building anything other than middle class single family homes. Great video.

Man i wish this was taken into account here in Arizona. I go from tempe to central phoenix for school and my commute is an hour long. Like jesus. Thats only HALFWAY across the city.

Great video. The situation in Dublin is extremely frustrating and I can feel it in your voice too. I'm planning on leaving the country as living in Dublin isn't possible as the transport is terrible causing what should be a 30 min commute to be 60 and living in the city is unaffordable.

I'd say build towards what I'd refer to as a "transit oriented cluster-sprawl". You first invest heavily in a quick and reliable rapid transit system that spans at least 75% of the metropolitan area to ensure that most people will be connected to the downtown core within an hour without a car. BRT and Suburban rail is a good start, but if you can put in metro and light rail systems, things will move ahead more quickly. Metro stations encourage dense mixed-use development anywhere you put them. A Vancouver Skytrain station typically attracts $4 Billion in property investment within a 15 minute walk, with rapid bus service linking surrounding lower income areas. Smaller municipalities can then push for affordable housing developments along these bus lines so that the city can grow with as little impact to congestion as possible. Building better highways and commuter rail service to nearby smaller cities and towns with lower property value, will encourage high density, mixed use clusters built to facilitate the growing populous and economy the city. Accessible transportation is the most important aspect to an individual's ability to climb the economic ladder. Secondly, zone mixed use as much as possible, speed up the building permit process, make property rights and building regulations fair and flexible, and have as few taxes and regulations on small businesses as possible. This will see your city grow and develop organically from a grass-roots level, and with fewer taxes and regulations, you will see affordable housing developed more quickly to meet demand of local consumers - the developer who can best create housing to meet the local GDP per-capita will profit just as much as one building luxury condominiums downtown. Thirdly, have the city invest in a Singapore-style affordable housing model where citizens essentially crowd-fund their own apartment building, with their mortgage costing the same as the average monthly rent for a middle-working class lifestyle. This system just works, end of story - that's how Singapore solved its housing crisis decades ago. Having these developments situated along major transit routes will help alleviate congestion issues while growing the city. Long story short, build proper transit, and zone for high density mixed use around every major transit stop. What you'll find is that what was once just a city core with a sprawl is now a collection of interconnected city cores that can be navigated by anyone on the economic ladder quickly. This encourages greater private business and residential development, which is in turn encourages greater development of affordable housing. It's the model that I believe Vancouver is headed towards as a solution to its own housing crisis.

There are 2 ways to solve a tough problem in high school , 1. Copy from the smart classmate and modify a little 2. Study hard. Choose No. 1. Which country in the world solved the housing problem in the most efficient way? I think it’s Singapore. Is it perfect? And can it be copied 100%? No & No. but, they have done a lot of things right. Stop the buy house as investment/rent income, government built housing, use retirement savings (CPF) as mortgage payment, ...

As a home developer in California, it cost 2x the money in permits and fees to build a house than it does in materials. Then $1,000 a month in property taxes. There are 4 empty lots on my street alone but no profit motive to build. Housing crisis is 100% government made here.

People saying to build more houses need to watch the other video from this channel talking about urban sprawl.....

The focus of this video is plainly housing for lower income earners. The issue is that cities are not built for low income individuals. If you build a ton of affordable housing, you change the demographic for shops and businesses as well as lower the tax revenue. I understand the altruistic focus of this video, and believe it is correct, but it is not feasible. You look at the cost per square footage for building, but the real graph should be revenue per square mile. Cities are only interested in maximizing how much revenue they can generate per their limited footprint. A city that focuses on what you outline in this video will struggle to bring in tourism and revenue. People go to New York because it is expensive and indulgent. A city built around affordable housing will have affordable businesses because the demographics of the city can't afford indulgence. I believe there needs to be a better mix, but the balance of altruism and revenue is a hard one. Another solution is to decentralize from large cities. Small cities and towns do not depend on tourism and can easily expand and offer housing to any income level. This is why lower income families have such a higher standard of living. Ignoring the bright lights of the city is a great way to reduce poverty and homelessness.

Living in LA, only a very small area has tall buildings, the rest is just miles and miles of houses and mega shopping centers. The sprawling is so extreme, there’s simply no way to have public transit. We have to get rid of cars by building more central living with central businesses. Houses have to be phased out.

this seems to be happening all over the world

You always have awesome videos, and they're great at breaking down complicated concepts into basic models that almost anyone can understand without removing any important details.

As an Architect and an urbanist, I really do appreciate this format of presentations. Thanks for the great work.

You know, there's actually a solution to all of this. Henry George noticed that even though New York City was the wealthiest city in the world, it had a lot of poor people because land use was tied up by land speculators. To solve this problem, George proposed a land value tax which is a tax on the value of land. It differs from a property tax which does penalize land speculation to some degree but also penalizes land improvement since it taxes the whole property. A land value tax only taxes the land on which the property sits. No matter what is built on the property, the tax will not increase. The tax can only go up with land value (i.e. size of land, resources, and everything around the land). It is only natural for us to tax land value for a few reasons. The first reason is that taxes generally disincentives behavior. If you have to pay a tax to do something, you're less likely to do it. This is a truth that far to few on the left acknowledge. Taxing land does not decrease the amount of land available. Since land has a perfectly inelastic supply, no tax can decrease the amount of land. What an LVT would disincentives is unproductive use of land. The second reason comes down to self ownership. From a deontological perspective, we all own ourselves which is why crimes against people (assault, rape, and murder) are crimes to begin with. We own our our labor which is why we own what we make and what we buy with currency that we earn. Therefore, crimes against property such as vandalism, theft, and trespassing are wrong. If I ask you how you obtained your current home, chances are that you didn't build it, you bought it from someone else. If you go back far enough, your home was built for the first owner who bought it. Right to labor can be used to give you self ownership of your house. But what about land? No man made it. If you live in the US, chances are that your land was, at some point, seized from the Native Americans. And they may have seized it from their neighbors as well. The Iroquois had their land taken from them by the US government but they got their land by invading their neighbors. The Spaniards took land from the Aztecs and Incas who in turn took it from their neighbors. In Europe, Asia, and Africa, most land was likely taken by conquest at some point or another. The point I'm trying to make is that self ownership cannot be used to claim land as legitimate property. John Locke did talk about the labor theory of land in which people can claim land by doing work on it. Naturally, if nobody does work on it for a certain period of time, that land should be up for grabs. Ancaps see this as being how self ownership pertains to the ownership of land but they leave out that Locke also added that this principle only applies so long as there's land left to claim. What then if there's no more land left to claim and a large portion of land was stolen? Whether you believe that land was made by God or natural processes, I think it goes to show that no individual can claim ownership of land. Whether it be through the creation mandate or the lack of nonhumans contesting us for land, it's safe then to say that land belongs to everyone. The LVT would simply be the fee paid by the title owner of land for the government to give you the right to exclude others from your land. The third reason is that an LVT would be good for the economy. Since those with more valuable land would pay a higher tax, there would be an incentive to put land to its most efficient use. This would allow more people to move to cities such as NYC, SF, and LA by increasing housing supply. This, in turn, would incentives more companies to relocate to those cities, thereby causing more people to move there. The fourth reason is that it would improve the well being of the middle class. I'm not going to argue that it would actually increase the paychecks of Americans (except those who move to the big cities because housing is now cheaper) but rather that paychecks would go farther under an LVT because rent would be lower, encouraging retailers to lower prices. You can learn more about the LVT at this subreddit FAQ: www.reddit.com/r/georgism/wiki/faq/

Here's what I'll be okay with. >200 square foot room >100 square foot bathroom(separated into shower room and toilet room with sink) >Some sort of food subscription service/communal kitchen so I don't have to cook or use my space for a kitchen. >Large 1 car garage big enough to have full-size tool boxes, workbench, and space to work on my vehicle(s)

Probably one of the best videos you've done yet and the best one I've seen on this topic. Definitely a great choice for a topic. It's also nice that you presented the complexity of it while keeping a pragmatic view. Keep it up!

I'd be interested in a follow up video exploring the costs and structural/technical challenges of building down, instead of up. Have we gotten to a place where we can build down 10 stories in places that have really poor footings, for example? If so, are the costs insane, or is there some point on the graph where it actually becomes cost effective to go down instead of up?

1. Stop treating homes like investments. 2. Remove all tax breaks for investment properties. 3 Stop foreigners buying houses in your country.

Also to those saying they aren't moving, this is based on immigration statistics and what the current trends are. It doesn't mean you have to move into an urban area.

another thing to keep in mind when considering cost effectiveness of tall buildings is the site specific features such as ground conditions, water courses, local wind pressures, surrounding structures and site access. These will also affect the U curve mentioned at the beginning of the video in addition to the other factors mentioned. I would say the ground conditions and subsequent effect this has on the cost of the foundations should not be discounted as it very often has a large impact on cost and project construction time.

Without even watching it I’m gonna guess build more housing?

First step is radical. Take control of millions of apartments that people leave empty just to ramp up property and rent values.

Can you make a video about ovens? Like the types of ovens and their history? I’d just like to know many things about them in detail and you do a great job. This video was great to man, good work! Keep it up

The comments are truly something

Great video! Love your engineering analysis as always. On a side note, I grew up in Hong Kong in a 36 story building. Our population density is already one of the highest in the world. But it doesn’t solve the affordability issue. While the demand of housing is always strong, we don’t have a demand problem. What Hong Kong has is a artificial supply problem. The Hong Kong government controls and dictates all land sales. They limited the release of the plentiful buildable land to restrict supply, in turn to keep the price high. So even with many available engineering solution, it is up to the will and desire of the controlling governing body to “help” the society. That itself would probably be the greater challenge.

Something you might find interesting: I met a guy who works in Rotterdam in construction. Because the Netherlands is mostly reclaimed soil, he said, it's like building on custard. So the saying among people is "Three years for the foundation, three months for the building". I'm serious. There was a tunnel in the city center that had to be replaced and putting in the foundations took years. The moment they were done it was about six weeks to finish. Same with the only high-rises. Ugly construction sites for years. Check in, they've started building. Check in again and 'Poof' rooms are on the market. Amazing.

Very much appreciate your channel, Brian. In this episode you focused on building cost and zoning regulations as primary reasons why a city doesn’t offer more housing to those in need; in other words what you’re saying is that cities cannot increase the supply of housing (despite an excess demand) due to building cost and regulatory limitations. You’ve based this analysis on a core assumption: that the *supply* of housing tends to increase *in proportion to demand* if only those aforementioned constraints were to be removed. This assumption, however, is incorrect (most people make that same assumption; it’s wide-spread). Understanding that supply doesn't increase in proportion to increases in demand in the real estate market is critical to understanding the real estate market. Here’s an example: Notice the open-air parking lots in most urban areas: they’re hardly developed, used only for a few cars - even though (and this is crucial) there is an *exceptional* demand for housing in those areas. It’s not that these lots are not zoned for housing, or that it’s too expensive to build any kind of housing on those open-air parking lots. None of these things are true. The only reason these parking lots exist in the first place is because property ownership incentives are flawed: a person who owns an open-air parking lot often makes more money over time through property appreciation (even minus property taxes), and is therefore *not* incentivized to put this property to its optimal use, i.e. to use it to provide more housing. The core problem is that the land market (and therefore the real estate market) is, in actuality, an entry monopoly; an entry monopoly occurs whenever a market is closed to new participants because supply (i.e. land in prime locations) can’t be increased. See, the market for automobiles is different: if there is a greater demand for cars, more cars can (and will) be created. New land in good locations, however, cannot be made; so if property developers want to build more housing in a good location, they have to buy land from someone who already owns land in that location (if they choose to sell, that is!). This drastically increases cost, and thus limits the supply of affordable housing as well. There’s a lot more to this topic, but I’ve done my best to summarize a small part of it here in this comment. As you can tell, it’s a topic of great concern to me (to the extent that I wrote a book on it: unitism.com). I hope that what I was able to share has given you some pause and that you’re able to recognize the most overlooked aspect to the housing debate - overlooked because it’s right in front of us (rather, below us at all times).

Solve it? With enough housing for everybody, there would be no inflated prices! Can't accept that can´t we, a lot of rich people depend on the poor to pay large amount of money on rent, and interest on their real estate loan.

Brainstorming here: Would encouraging people to live outside of cities help with the housing crisis? Similar to how the U.S. encourages people to live in Alaska.

Anyone who says to remove rent controls to encourage more housing, ask them if they also support deregulating zoning to allow more density

Just make sure that as we build more, we build prettier. Bring back older architectural styles, be creative with space, verticality and layouts, build closer together. We need cities that look more like video game levels and less like prison complexes.

I get your point. But the reason for such restriction is older than you might think. Leonardo Da Vinci spend a lot of time in constructing a theoretical perfect city. In which he proposed that a lot of buildings should have similar shapes but also be different. Also he proposed that a lot of the buildings should have a height of about four floors. Also the highest building should represent for what the city stands for. Its values. Do you recognize it? Just look at Venice. It is a beautiful city in which people want to be there instead of just living there. I get your point that we need to reshape our cities, but it creates a lot of other problems. In your proposed town people would walk through and just see one giant building after another. Nobody would know what they represent. They would feel intimidated and have nothing in common for what this building stands for. People would get sick of so much other people and need their comfort zone, which they wouldn't have. Ever been in a full subway? Is this a place you want to be? Of course not. I have a better idea. Why not redistribute stores and work places more equally? Then you wouldn't force people to commute so much.

The answer is also to encourage growth elsewhere, not build larger increasingly inefficient tower blocks in the same place. Ireland is a bigger place than Dublin and it would be better for everyone if they encouraged job growth in other regions. Imagine if instead of forcing companies to pump money into a base in Dublin the government built some decent transport connections elsewhere so that smaller regional firms could gain the same competitive advantage that the established or larger firms in the capital had.

In Coventry, where I live we have swathes of empty buildings, multi story offices and spaces around the town center dedicated to parking. However there is no places for people to live in. Two bedroom houses are being converted into shared accommodation, something suited to students. These rooms go for £500. A few years ago you could rent a three bedroom house for £500. These shared accommodations have pushed up prices. If one room costs £500, then a two bedroom costs upwards of £650. 10 years ago my parents rented a three bedroom for £375/month. Of course the council could convert the multi story offices into flats, parking spaces into houses and empty shops into apartments. But every major development is aimed at the university students. The people are also part of the problem, you will find people claiming for council houses when they don't even need it. The cost of rent are so high, they usually rent out their council house for more money and pocket the profit. The council doesn't seem to check who occupies the property, they just assume its the person who was awarded the property. If they did regular checks on these council properties, they could potentially free up some houses, awarded to people who have rented it out.

You should know that if the temperature is above 42 °c people have a high risk of immediate death.

A huge influencing factor that you didn't touch on, the engineering and architecture has to be redone for every single tower and apartment complex. It's ridiculous that there are no open source designs available in the industry. As a software engineer that wanted to build a 12 unit 3 storey building, I could not find any plans to start off from. We would have had to go through an architect for sure, and it would have taken months to get a new design built, because he had designed something that "looks good" , but was a 6 unit complex taking the same amount of space as a 12 unit would. I wanted no bells or whistles. I wanted a tall box with 12 units and it seemed like I killed this man's hopes and dreams. As if I wasn't in the clique that is architecture. If we were to start an open source website for this sort of thing, I believe that the industry would change drastically fast, and for the better

Prefabricate residential building technology was actually all the hype of the late 60' and 70' in most Eastern European states. The problem with that, however, is that it has some additional hidden costs that people sometimes forget. First, prefabricated construction elements are usually way heavier than just the building materials (and cannot be portioned as one sees fit) what means the construction requires more high duty cranes to be able to keep up the pace. In addition, transport of the prefabricates from the factories to the construction site usually requires oversized vehicles, as the elements tend to be very big. Lastly, the effect of scale in the factory does not provide as great cost reduction as one might anticipate, and it might be not enough to offset increased transport costs. In other words, this approach to building is nothing new - it was common for decades, but due to enormous scale needed to operate such system (it is not efficient to build a prefabricate factory just for few construction projects), and various minor and major problems it turns out to be way less profitable than it might seem at first glance.

The cost of housing is a big problem. The banks love it but it enslaves people for their working lives. The property industry holds back to make more money too. You've mentioned Dublin. I've heard Belfast is heading in the same direction.

Housing is a problem because of greedy ppl investing in multiple houses and not utilizing it. I see so many apartments/flats empty in high rise buildings in India. In my point of view, better public transport will solve most of the problem that we face in major cities regarding housing. Right now there are too many cars on the road. If I stay far and can travel 30-40 miles in 20-40 mins via public transport rather than driving to my workplace, I will happily ditch my car and prefer living outside the city. Also, companies should encourage work from home concept if you are just working on a laptop or need a phone to make calls all the time rather than driving all the way. This will reduce company cost related to space and other costs involved plus save fuel and the environment. Right now my company has started partial work from home and I work 2-3 days from home in a week. Saves me commute time and fuel cost and doesn't require us to be living very close to our workplace.

Hearing you mention how price regulation is just simply ridiculous made me happy. Government cannot and should not attempt assigning market value to anything, as it's simply just unable to do so; only the people can do that.

Good analysis, but you missed the really obvious problem. Travelling to a central place of work ! The law of efficiency also applies to essential services. Treating waste, supplying water and power has the same exponential cost in big city centres, so smaller "hubs" are more efficient. The whole idea of having many types of companies house their employees in one location, in this day of high speed communications, is anachronistic. The only companies that need to conglomerate people are manufacturing, hospitals etc, but so many companies just have acres of desks. This de-centralisation should be legislated into existence. For a start, how about having company payroll tax etc reduced for all employees that work offsite, and decent tax breaks for people who have to set up their own home offices.

One of the best videos about solving housing crisises all around the world. Being a civil engineer, I am amazed at the potential.

OK PEOPLE, this channel is called REAL ENGINEERING, not REAL POLITICS. We're all here to appreciate the technology and the engineers behind which WHY WE WATCH THIS CHANNEL. Regardless of morals and politics and who came first blah blah, we can all be really impressed with not only the new things that come out of China but how they streamline the process for mass marketing. New discoveries don't do jack shit if it doesn't go to the people who need it and can use it.

1: Disband Airbnb and auction their property to individuals. 2: Hard cap the number of properties that can be owned by landlords or organizations in a city. 3: Large scale construction.

I really love the thumbnail images for these videos. They look great!

US never learned its lessons from the 2008 economy crisis and today its having a pandemic causing a economy recession and a trillions students loans debts. This is too much on us economy

5 years later and this video is now very relevant to what is happening is Australia at the moment.

I think you'll find there are more factors than the ones you mentioned. In the UK, we have massive immigration rates that push up demand and house prices, whilst said houses are built by private companies. These private companies will only build expensive 3-4 bedroom houses as it makes them more money, with barely any small, *affordable* 1-2 bedroom houses (in comparison) being built. It's not necessarily the fact we're not building enough houses, more that the wrong people are building the wrong houses. I suggest that migration is reduced and the government takes responsibility for building affordable 1-2 bedroom houses whilst private companies can still build their 3-4 bedroom houses but with some government subsidies to reduce costs of rent/mortgage for first-time buyers. This will reduce rise of demand and in turn stop house prices rocketing out of control, as they almost are in Britain.

in places with height restrictions, I wonder if the buildings could be made largely underground. Go deep instead of high.

It’s such a dilemma because the people who say the housing crisis is unfair on the younger generations are, most of the time, the same people who complain when new houses are being built in their area 🤦🏼‍♀️

I say a good max height for residential areas is 12 stories. Tall enough to make housing cheap, but short enough to not dwarf the surroundings. Make these buildings look nice and and keep the local aesthetic, and you have a nice livable place.

just build houses with legos, it is much faster, fun and children can do it

Another great video keep it up man

I live in Dublin. I didn't expect this video to be so taylored to me. The housing crisis is pretty bad here. My friend has an apartment in the city centre that costs €10,000 (10,876 USD) for 8 months. The floor space can literally only fit a bed. He can't fit a desk in the room. It's that small. There's a communal kitchen that is too small for the amount of people living on the floor. I blame the government.

I know in California it's basically impossible to build a new building of any kind, and it's even harder to build a living space. Most contractors get caught up for years if not decades before they can actually finish a single building. The cost of all the inspections, licenses, permits, regulations, legal teams, and time invested makes whatever new buildings are built are priced FAR outside the range of anyone who needs it. An engineer proposed a shipping container sized modular apartment complex in my city and was approved. He dropped the project when the total cost after all the licenses and permits made it impossible to offer the apartments cheap.

Hire Thanos to snaps his fingers. Easy

Real long term solution- Massive space colonization to relieve Earth's population burden. Preserve existing cities and start on orbital cylinders made from asteriod metal and spun to provide artificial gravity. If we start now, our grand children could choose between downtown appartments or an orbital suburb.

Multistoreys have lots of issues to embed them into the rest of the city: not only obvious stuff like traffic dumping or school places but things like recycling rates, parkland crowding, water run-off. It's difficult

A great idea would possibly have to be to make a tower with lego-like rooms. They would be assembled off site and sort of snapped together to form an ever changing tower design. The city needs the building to get a floor taller? Snap on another set of floor and add a stairwell block and maybe an elevator block column. Making them out of cost-effective light but strong materials and perhaps insulating them with aerogel would further increase savings by simply building to what is needed. If you don't want to take that route or it isn't good, a car park that stores cars in vertical space might help eliminate large car parks.

Why do you say “height” like “heith”?

Real Engineering Best Engineering

I live in Vancouver 1 of the top 10 most expensive cities, Vancouver from the get go was extremely accommodative to skyscrapers, and what were noticing now, is that the last of Vancouver's 5-6 story buildings are being replaced by 70 story buildings, theirs at least 25, 70 story buildings on their way currently. Its incredible uplifting to live in a modern metropolis.

It's been 6 years since this video was uploaded. The problem will never be solved

Machine learning is wonderful, but is impotent when faced with stupid selfish and greedy governance.

This is a good video, and all points of are indeed true. But building higher also has it's tradeoffs, and these are by no means minor.To explore some of them, you might want to look at Moscow, my home city. If you go away from the center, you quickly find yourself surrounded by blocks and blocks of the same-looking industrial buildings 16 stories tall. This here is called "anthill", and is heavily critisised by many russian urban planners and architects. Apart from obvious aesthetic concerns, it discourages the formation of small businesses (high density of population means there is high demand, which is best met by big supermarkets) and there is no such thing as "local community" really in Moscow. Also, it doesn't seem to solve the problem of traffic jams, sadly.

The best method is what Germany does. Every other village has a factory. It's brilliant, they brought the jobs to the people in stead of letting the people overflow the cities. Very few cities have a population of more than 1M people.

The single biggest cost for construction is planning commissions, neighbourhood review boards, and other forms of excess bureaucracy. If you can trim the red tape, you'll accelerate the growth process.

Weel you could always just go full 60's and putt massive 15-story stones blocks everywhere

PLEASE! PLEASE come to Moscow and see what high rise building does to a city!! Do you wish the same for Dublin?! (question you'll be asking yourself after you visit). I think a city is like a jar - it has limits as to how many people it can fit. Trying to force 2 litters of water into a 1 litter jar would be called insanity. That insanity pushes prices up as demand grows, but it does not always mean that you need to supply more housing to compensate the demand. I believe that a ratio of traffic to building's height is the answer to how much you should build. And i was very surprised that it matched your calculations of 6-8 stores. My estimates (for Moscow!) concluded at about 5 stores. That is taking into consideration personal cars (which you're probably against of, but due to climate and Russia's area i believe car ownership is a must). Cars per capita in Russia is only about 300, which is extremely low. Yet Moscow is Europe's number 1 city by traffic jams (and number 2 in the world, after LA). So despite the fact that there are fewer cars than in EU cities (more than 600 per capita) and much higher buildings (25-30 stories for residents on periphery!) we cannot solve any of the problems we have. Moscow has the best subway system in the world, but it is packed. All in all, my point is - you cannot grow cities forever. By my estimates Moscow is over populated by 3 times. Nearly 20% of the country population live in and around Moscow! That is pure insanity. And that insanity is the result of the will to build high rise buildings (of extremely poor quality btw) instead of letting the economy and prices to control population. So if somebody cannot afford to life in the center of Dublin next to his work - he should move elsewhere. There are other cities in the world. Otherwise you'll end up in a much bigger crisis than you originally started with. If you wish to visit Moscow i'd be happy to assist you in applying for visa and getting housing. The best time to come would be in late fall to experience the climate side of the equation. Because summer isn't interesting - it's warm, half the city is on vacation and life is normal. But when working season starts - that's a whole different story. That is when fundamentals start working. And note that Moscow only has about 3 months on good weather and the rest is the cold and very cold season.

The problem is not that we don't have the technical means to build housing in sufficient quantity. It is that we rely on private compagnies that dont have any economical incentive to provide more housing and make it affordable.