
‘Build More Housing’ Is No Match for Inequality - gmck
https://www.citylab.com/equity/2019/05/housing-supply-home-prices-economic-inequality-cities/588997/
======
mabbo
> It mainly leads to building high-end housing in desirable locations

Which is perfectly fine! It still works, because houses do not have intrinsic
price tags. They have intrinsic ordering of values, but their price is
determined by what people are willing to pay.

Line up every person in the city in order of how much they're willing to spend
on a home. Do the same with the homes available. Face the two lines across
from each other. Everyone will buy a home nearby to what is across from them
right now. Building a whole bunch more houses on the top end of the house
scale doesn't leave those mansions empty, it just drives the mid-range homes
further down the scale.

Supply shorter causes those further up the scale of "willing to spend on a
home" to have only modest homes as options (what's across from them). At the
same time, it pushes less and less desirable homes (often ones 2 hours commute
from work) in front of those less able to afford homes.

If you want to argue that the divide between rich and poor is growing, and
it's a problem, oh heck yeah I'm on board for that argument. But conflating
the housing shortage problems with that allows the landlords to keep getting
richer.

~~~
dragonwriter
> Line up every person in the city in order of how much they're willing to
> spend on a home.

This is the “city as a closed universe” fallacy. What you actually have to do
is line up every potential purchase of a home (which may be more than one per
buyer) in the city by any person in _the world_ in that order.

Which is why you can't move the needle very much in a high demand region by
increasing supply in any way that is practical over any reasonable period [0];
there's usually a lot of available demand that must be filled before you see a
perceptible price drop.

[0] at least before considering the effect that population density outpacing
service and infrastructure scaling can have on desirability, which isn't
usually the effect people are looking to leverage to reduce price, though
making the city into a hellhole _does_ have that effect.

~~~
rayiner
If you build more housing and prices don’t go down, that means your satisfying
unmet demand. And that’s a good thing too—you’re increasing the tax base of
your city. If you keep building, then at some point the unmet demand will be
met and prices will go down. Every step of that is a win.

~~~
majormajor
Only if constant growth is always good.

Every step of that has side effects that people may not like.

Nobody talks like this about traffic. More lanes, same slow traffic speed.
Yep, that's newly satisfied demand. It's also widely considered undesirable
and self-defeating.

It's not irrational to think that slowing down or distributing the growth
elsewhere - geographically - would be preferred.

~~~
roenxi
I can think of three mechanisms to bring down house prices:

1) Build more houses

2) Reduce the amount of lending banks do

3) Distant third, if the government has mucked up the tax/renting incentives
so much that people are leaving houses empty that should be fixed.

They all sound good to me. However, if the complaint underlying "prices are
too high" is that people don't have a place to live then that can't be fixed
without growing the stock of available housing. Growth is required. We don't
want people to have to chose where they live because there aren't enough
houses being built, we want them to move based on economic opportunity or
because they like the lifestyle.

Traffic is different from housing. In a moment of flippancy, I suggest that
nobody wants to be sitting in traffic, but they are happy to be sitting in
their own house.

~~~
WillPostForFood
I'd add:

4) move the jobs to less expensive cities. The discussion largely driven by a
very small area in a few cities that have been extremely successful at job
growth in tech, finance, and lobbying. There isn't a housing affordability
crisis across most of the country.

~~~
bryan_w
I'd add:

5) move the people to less expensive cities. The discussion largely driven by
a very small area in a few cities that have been extremely successful at job
growth in tech, finance, and lobbying. There isn't a housing affordability
crisis across most of the country.

------
dkhenry
I don't understand how papers like this get published. The title of the paper
seems almost designed to lead you to the wrong conclusion. The paper is about
income inequality, and it appears to be a meta-study proposing that building
more houses won't help a given area reduce inequality. However the main thing
people are discussing is pricing, and affordability, as you can note from the
citylab subtitle (won’t solve the urban affordability crisis)

Building more houses will absolutly help the urban affordability crisis, as
the paper claims if you were to build more housing in San Fransicsco obviously
it would be occupied by high paid tech workers, that doesn't mean it didn't
make the situation better for everyone as all those people who are not living
in the upzoned houses didn't go bid up the existing housing stock.

Right now California is estimated to have a four million housing unit
shortage, doing a study about a few hundred units built and then claiming it
didn't help anything is beyond dishonest.

Also the paper ends not with a solution, but with saying we should not try to
build near transit. It really reads to me like the authors decided they didn't
like the propsed legislation for upzoning so they picked a bunch of data that
supported their views and cobbled together a paper.

~~~
driverdan
The paper isn't published, it's put on a free Wordpress blog[1] run by two
people[2]. As far as I can tell there's no peer review or editing.

1: [https://peeg.wordpress.com/2019/05/05/19-14-housing-urban-
gr...](https://peeg.wordpress.com/2019/05/05/19-14-housing-urban-growth-and-
inequalities-the-limits-to-deregulation-and-upzoning-in-reducing-economic-and-
spatial-inequality/)

2: [https://peeg.wordpress.com/about-2/](https://peeg.wordpress.com/about-2/)

------
rayiner
The paper attacks a straw man:

> The barrier that must be lifted in order to make this happen is, according
> to this view, insufficient housing construction in prosperous areas due to
> local restrictive zoning in those regions. The places where policy is needed
> are therefore not the lagging and falling-behind regions, but the prosperous
> areas, which are perceived as afflicted by the disease of NIMBYism (Not-In-
> My-Back-Yard). Undoing NIMBY-ism would allow people from other regions, whom
> are deemed to be excluded by high housing prices and low availability in
> prosperous places, to move to prosperity (thus, a place-based policy leads
> to a people-based outcome).

Of course, knobs that affect the supply and price of housing will not cause
companies to hire workers without in-demand skills at higher wages. That is
completely orthogonal to whether turning those knobs will decrease the price
of housing.

Furthermore, "building more housing" is like planting trees. The right time to
do it was 40 years ago. If you look at cities with relatively reasonably
priced housing, like Chicago, you'll see that the bulk of the moderately-
priced housing stock is older. Fancy new condos at sky-high prices are getting
built, but you can still get a good deal on a unit in an older building. The
problem in cities like San Francisco is that those units weren't built back in
the 1970s and 1980s.

~~~
WillPostForFood
Isn't Chicago more a case of declining population than building? Chicago
shrunk ~25% from its peak population in the 1950s. It is lot less of a
challenge to have affordable housing with declining population. Add in the
massive white flight, and I'm not sure what the Chicago lesson is.

~~~
2trill2spill
Most but not all American cities have less people now then in the 1950s. But
household sizes are much smaller and the amount of Housing units in most
cities is actually higher then the 50s as a result of smaller household sizes.
However many of these cities still have a housing affordability problem even
though they have less people now.

------
tomasien
It's not intuitively clear to me what the point of this article is. Is it
challenging the premise that building more housing stops the growth (or
reverses the growth) of housing in urban areas? It seems to be but then most
of what is talked about is not that.

The evidence for "more housing = slower rising or shrinking housing costs" is
so strong in places like Brooklyn and Seattle that it seems almost impossible
to really to challenge it.

~~~
rmah
The article's thesis is that building more housing does not reduce wealth
inequality. Which makes sense. However, that's not why people are demanding
more housing in places like San Francisco. They want more housing so that
housing prices and rents will stabilize or decline. This allows people at
lower income levels to have better quality of life. They are, of course, still
at lower income levels. The article calls this a failure. Others may call it a
success.

~~~
tomasien
Thank you - that was incredibly hard to parse.

------
mywittyname
You can have a city with a large number of wealthy people and affordable
housing, but it requires enough housing for everyone.

The big issue with affordable housing is that you can't build it now.
Affordable living quarters are those which were built a long time ago and have
depreciated in real terms over time. It's not really possible to build a
decent house today for $30,000, but 40 years ago you could. That same house
could go for $80k, $300k, or $600k today, depending upon how much new
construction kept up with population growth over that time.

This fact is why areas of California are screwed. There's no quick fix for
this problem, the treatment for a housing crisis is decades of construction
that exceeds the pace of population growth. Given that treatment and enough
time, there will be plenty of available housing stock at 2x median wages.

~~~
deathanatos
Housing developments are regularly proposed that have a certain percentage of
units that are "affordable housing" in that their price is _artificially_ held
low. (And there are restrictions on purchasing such units, so that a well-off
person can't simply sweep them off the market.)

But even such developments are also being rejected by SF, even ones that would
increase the number of affordable housing units available overall. For
example, a project in SoMa was unanimously rejected because it overshadowed —
on the day with the most shadow — 18% of a nearby park[1].

It is clear to anyone who is watching that SF is not concerned about the
affordability of its city, or the livelihood of those who are not well-off
enough to afford homes whose median price has been as high as $1.6M.

(And while I disagree that you can't build affordable housing now, I do agree
with your treatment.)

[1]: [https://sf.curbed.com/2019/4/10/18304717/shadow-housing-
sf-p...](https://sf.curbed.com/2019/4/10/18304717/shadow-housing-sf-park-
supervisors-vote-reject-nimby)

------
mjevans
If I had to pick ONE hammer/nail to use to fix this problem, it would be more
housing, orders of magnitude more housing.

Actual competition, in this case, actual choices for housing, having enough
units on the market that slack is normal and expected, would definitely solve
the inequality issue: and there's NO WAY the market's going to go back to that
state naturally. Distorted market forces created a seller's (rent-seekers
actually) market, and it's going to take drastic measures, or economic death,
to correct it.

Edit: Though while we're at it, go ahead and encourage good community
development and programs that make it easier for first time home buyers and
stable jobs and all the other things that lead to better communities and more
empowered people in general.

------
johngalt
The article presents a 'gentrification' view of development. Building new
housing simply allows landowners and developers to build another luxury condo
tower, and for additional rich and high skilled workers to move in. The
network effects of which only drive up land values and costs even further.
Concluding that upzoning and building only allows landlords to switch out low
revenue tenants for high revenue tenants.

First off it seems to me like every city would love to have this sort of
problem. "We can't possibly build enough housing to satisfy all the demand
from highly paid/skilled knowledge workers who want to move to our city." To a
city government sounds a lot like "I can't build enough garage space to park
all my lamborghinis!"

Secondly, what happens when we run this theory in reverse? If we bulldoze a
quarter of the housing does that mean that home prices go down? I guess at
some point that might actually be true. It might constrict business/growth
enough that the remaining houses would be less expensive. Call it the Detroit
plan for affordable housing. Make all the high paying jobs leave and housing
prices become more affordable. Which I guess 'works' to supply affordable
housing.

------
ChuckMcM
Does anyone have the paper? The dot com bust was a pretty strong counter
narrative to this paper and I'd like to understand their reasoning. For those
not fortunate enough to live it, when the bubble burst on the dot.coms a lot
of people moved out of the Bay Area, the economic downturn was harsh, but it
was mechanical rather than systemic. In that a number of firms that had been
injecting capital into the market simply vanished. As a result the number of
available jobs shrank, and people who were renting simply moved away (at one
point there was a 6 to 8 week waiting period to get a U-haul truck to rent and
people were being paid to fly to different cities and drive the trucks back to
the bay area)

The effect on housing was that fewer people were competing for homes and so
prices stabilized (and people who had used stock options to buy were sometimes
forced to sell instead of buy the home). This lead to a large drop in prices
in homes that were far away (Livermore, Modesto, Sacramento, Etc) making the
isolines for cost vs closeness to the bay much shallower. People in companies
that were not dead found that they could buy a house in one of the 'close'
counties (Santa Clara, Alameda, and San Mateo) and did so.

Anyway, it is impossible to control all the variables in economics generally
but I would like to see how the authors came to their conclusions.

------
tschellenbach
"It’s supply and demand at work, they argue".. hmmm yep, that's how it works.
These problems are not going to get addressed if people keep on coming up with
other theories that don't really address the problem.

Build more to increase supply and spread out demand by facilitating good
transport.

Good news is that all those high paying jobs should provide plenty of budget
for the government to address this problem...

------
adrianmonk
> _“The idea that upzoning will cause housing affordability to trickle down
> \\[ ... \\] is just a lot to promise”_

Increasing housing supply is not the same thing as trickle down. It confuses
the issue to call it this.

Trickle down refers to the idea of giving out money (in the form of tax
breaks) to stimulate the economy. It essentially says that cash handouts to
businesses and investors will indirectly make it into poorer people's hands.

Removing limits on housing is fundamentally different than this because there
is no handout involved. Instead of rich people _receiving_ money, rich people
(also called investors) _put up_ money to finance the costs of increasing the
supply.

Also, nobody is saying that increasing supply will eliminate inequality. That
part is kind of a straw man. Real estate is still "location, location,
location", and living in a desirable area (near jobs, etc.) will continue to
cost more. What increasing supply does is change _one multiplier_ on costs. In
my mind, the relevant question to ask is: if affordability is a big problem,
why wouldn't you want to turning one of the knobs you can turn to change a
multiplier and make it better?

~~~
fwip
You're reading too deep into the analogy. It's just similar to trickle-down
economics in that the idea is "if you let more rich people get houses, that
will help poor people get houses too."

------
raquo
Yeah, cities don't get cheaper as they grow in size and density. They become
more desirable due to better availability of jobs and services, and therefore
more expensive.

Of course a myopic analysis of building a single tower is not going to capture
long term effects of building a hundred of such towers over many years.
Especially if your incentives say you should build.

If governments want cities to be affordable they need to

\- make cities less desirable compared to currently semi urban areas by
spreading out the location of government services and jobs, providing
incentives for private companies to do the same

\- allow for building reasonable amounts of housing, but only the kinds and
locations that match policy objectives

\- cut off all "investment" demand for housing by eliminating the expectation
of risk free profit. Ban foreign money, add much higher property taxes on
anything but primary residences and purpose built rentals, etc.

If you set up a proper incentive structure for everyone, things will settle in
a much much better equilibrium than today. Desirable places will still be
expensive, but general affordability would improve a lot due to layers of
profit seeking parasites exiting the market.

------
davidw
It turns out denser housing is better for the environment too, so we should
upzone even if the premise of this article were true (to me it seems kind of
suspect to deny that supply and demand don't really work for housing):

[https://www.thenation.com/article/zoning-housing-homeless-
se...](https://www.thenation.com/article/zoning-housing-homeless-segregation/)

~~~
CuriouslyC
Density isn't a lock for environmental friendliness. High density structures
require environmentally unfriendly building materials relative to lower
density structures, and a local environment has a limited ability to deal with
pollutants and waste, requiring significant additional infrastructure to
accommodate. Furthermore, higher density means more transportation
infrastructure to bring resources to the people who live in an area, whereas a
lot of these resources could be locally sourced if the density was lower.

I think modern large multi-story wooden structures surrounded by food forests
and urban farms is probably optimal in terms of environmental impact, while
also being extremely livable.

------
sologoub
This seems to be the central argument:

> “While building more affordable housing in core agglomerations would
> accommodate more people,” the authors note, “the collapse of the urban wage
> premium for less-educated workers means that the extra housing would mostly
> attract additional skilled workers.”

In other words,they seem to argue that building more only attracts more high-
paid works.

Ok... so let’s build even MORE, until a new equilibrium is reached at a lower
price. There is a finite number of the higher paid jobs and a finite number of
people who can perform them without additional training. That number is not
small, so if want to change the market for housing, amount of new supply must
also not be small.

Seattle has been making a dent, but unfortunately not a very big one:
[https://www.seattletimes.com/business/real-estate/amid-
build...](https://www.seattletimes.com/business/real-estate/amid-building-
boom-1-in-10-seattle-apartments-are-empty-and-rents-are-dropping/)

Imagine what would happen if they built even more?

However, if we did build enough, a significant number of people would be
impacted in a different way - it’s impossible to build just the right number,
so we are much more likely to significantly reduce the value of homes if we
built enough (in actuality too much) to not price people out. Anyone that
bought around the time of the boom would likely see prices fall.

~~~
skybrian
The alternative is to avoid creating high-paying jobs in already crowded
areas.

That sounds counterintuitive, but put it this way: there are many other places
that would love to have more of these jobs. Rather than competing with them,
cooperate in proving incentives for companies to move or expand elsewhere.

------
nicpottier
Isn't this ignoring that a lot of upzoning comes with the requirement that a
percentage of new units are made to be affordable? (at least that's the case
in recent Seattle projects I've seen)

Sure, if the market is completely free then it will build the highest value
items (shwanky condos), but that's (thankfully) not the world we live in.

------
RcouF1uZ4gsC
>doing so won’t magically solve economic and spatial inequality, because both
are deeply rooted in the very nature of the geographically clustered and
concentrated knowledge economy.

This is one of the great paradoxes to me. The knowledge economy would seem to
the one sector that could entirely function on remote work. Instead, workers
are concentrated in a few cities (SF, Silicon Valley, NYC, Seattle) and drive
up the housing costs and prices in general exacerbating inequality. The
average non-tech worker in these cities has trouble with housing and daycare
due to these tech workers driving up the costs.

One of the best way tech companies could address inequality would be to foster
a culture of remote work. This would ease up on the housing crisis. Well paid
tech workers could go to other parts of the country/world where they would be
a benefit to the local economy and culture instead of a harm because they
would be spread out.

~~~
cortesoft
There are a few problems with this.

One, lots of people want to work in physical proximity to their coworkers. I
know I am one of those people; I could work remote, but I enjoy the social
aspect of working in an office.

Second, part of the appeal of living in one of these expensive cities is that
the amenities are also nice. When you cluster a lot of wealthy people
together, the public services get better, there are more entertainment
options, etc. Being a wealthy person in a cheaper part of the country might
sound nice and have its perks, but you are going to find fewer places to spend
the money you have.

Third, people like to live with people in their same class. We really hate
talking about class in the US, but it is there nonetheless. It is not easy to
be a well off tech worker when the people in your social circle are blue
collar workers struggling to make ends meet.

~~~
rifung
> Third, people like to live with people in their same class. We really hate
> talking about class in the US, but it is there nonetheless. It is not easy
> to be a well off tech worker when the people in your social circle are blue
> collar workers struggling to make ends meet.

I don't know if I agree with that. I am a low level engineer but still
consider myself fairly privileged. It makes me really happy when I'm able to
help my friends buy something they couldn't otherwise afford. Yes it pains me
to see they are struggling but I am happy knowing I can help them if they ever
need it and it gives me a reason to keep working.

I also have friends who are significantly more well off than I am. In my
opinion, they don't understand the value of money well.

Personally I think it's dangerous to put yourself in a position where you can
just forget that there are other people who are genuinely struggling as it can
distort your perception of money.

------
0x262d
it turns out that if you care about everyone having a place to live that they
can afford given the jobs available to them, the free market sucks.

the solution is to build more (socially owned, permanently affordable, high
quality) housing. emphasis on the part where it isn't a slum that is doomed to
fail and is horrible to live in.

~~~
mamon
And where is that mythical place that actually has free market for housing?
Most countries/states have building codes and other regulations that mess up
simple supply/demand dynamic.

~~~
fwip
The "free market" is not a binary value. Surely you agree that there's a
difference between building codes and state-owned housing?

------
znpy
I’d heavily tax un-rented properties. If property is not being actually used
for housing it should be expensive to keep it. Administration should
disincentive hoarding of houses.

------
jeffdavis
There are two related issues: one is density overall, and the other is the
housing to jobs ratio.

Adding a tall office building adds to density but skews the housing to jobs
ratio. Probably increases inequality, worsens transit problems, and increases
housing prices.

Adding a tall apartment building in SF or Palo Alto would rebalance the ratio
of jobs to housing, alleviate transit problems, and make housing more
affordable.

I guess the article is arguing that imcreasing density in the abstact
increases inequality, which may be true. But the argument is not to just
"build"; it's "build housing to rebalance the ratio" which actually would
solve a lot of problems.

Density had positives and negatives. If you want to keep a given density ina
given city, then fine. But crazy skew where you puts jobs far from housing is
just bad policy.

It might be more precise to say "either build housing or raze office space"
but it seems a little ridiculous to tear down vibrant office buildings, so the
answer is to build housing.

------
speedplane
A better way of improving housing equality is by adding a new renter tax.
Every time a property is rented out, the landlord would need to pay a one-time
tax. Landlords will be incentivized to keep tenants in their homes longer, as
increasing the rent and forcing someone out will look less attractive if they
have to pay a tax for a new renter.

------
throwing838383
Look at all the cities that don't have Zoning, like Houston, TX. They don't
have the kind of housing problems that over regulated CA does. Despite a
population of over 2million (3 times more than SF) and growing much faster
too, those places are much much more cost effect (100$ per sq foot vs over
1200$ per sq foot in SF). People need to learn how supply and demand work.

Sure, if you start building in SF, it's going to take time to fix. But not
adding more supply is like saying, "Well, we've turning coal plants into solar
panels but C02 levels are still rising". Just like every solar panel, Every
bit more supply will help.

And even more important, is the underlying cost to build. If that's not low
enough, the problem will never be fixed entirely. The underlying cost, is
usually to high in Blue cities due to regulation, zoning and the loss of the
middle class which raises labor costs.

~~~
unixbeard1337
Houston doesn't have zoning, but does have fairly stringent land-use
regulations on single-family homes (min. lot size, setbacks, etc.) See:
[https://marketurbanism.com/2016/09/19/how-houston-
regulates-...](https://marketurbanism.com/2016/09/19/how-houston-regulates-
land-use/)

Houston is also surrounded by sparsely-populated countryside, rather than on
three sides by water like SF, giving it more room to grow cheaply.

------
tasubotadas
"They would, however, increase gentrification within prosperous regions and
would not appreciably decrease income inequality"

From the paper. That makes me question if an actually competent person wrote
this. Income inequality is not a problem. Lack of housing and housing prices
are.

------
irjustin
For what it's worth, I agree with the headline as stated. Without controls,
the scenario of NYC or Hong Kong appear.

One answer to this particular problem for Singapore has been public housing.
Public housing is completely different concept in SG as 70% of all housing is
"public".

There are no direct price controls but only PR or Citizens are allowed to own
these places which places a natural cap on housing. New developments are
handed out via lottery with preference going to first time owners.

This naturally limits who can buy into new developments allowing younger
families to inflow into said locations thus keeping prices low.

US Cities would be hard pressed to find a scheme that works (article hardly
proposes a solution), but I agree simply supplying more would not work.

~~~
Redoubts
> Without controls, the scenario of NYC or Hong Kong appear.

SF is now more expensive than Manhattan, so I'm not sure what you're arguing
here.

------
odiroot
What a silly article. In many places affordability is not the issue. The real
issue is availability. You just cannot work around shortage of apartments. It
just physically can never work -- unless maybe you forcefully restrict the
population of a city (hukou style).

------
jupp0r
> the collapse of the urban wage premium for less-educated workers means that
> the extra housing would mostly attract additional skilled workers

Doesn't this contradict their conclusion? What are those workers attracted by
if not more affordable housing?

------
siculars
For every residential building built mandate 20% units allocated for low
income housing.

You end up with incentivized developers and low income families distributed
throughout the region and not centralized in projects.

Problem solved.

------
cybersnowflake
"Build more Housing" is not the answer. Okay fine, add "Not everybody in the
world needs to or should live in San Francisco or Manhattan" to the list of
rules

------
throwawaysea
Why not aim for more of a distributed economy and/or distributed housing
instead of trying to crowd in on small patches of highly-desirable/expensive
locations?

------
burlesona
This paragraph summarizes the entire article:

> They agree that housing is part of the problem: “Housing market failures can
> imperil local economic growth and generate problems such as segregation,
> long commute times, deteriorating quality of life, homelessness, and
> barriers to social mobility for certain populations,” they write. But
> housing policy, and zoning restrictions in particular, are certainly not the
> be-all and end-all of urban problems. Upzoning expensive cities is no match
> for the deep divides within—and especially between—cities, and is wholly
> insufficient to remedy them.

I haven't heard anyone argue that just "upzoning San Francisco" is going to
fix all urban problems, much less "[set] up Los Angeles and San Francisco as
the new golden land for people in less prosperous regions," as the article
says.

However to say that "It mainly leads to building high-end housing in desirable
locations," is practically a tautology. Upper / high-end housing in desirable
locations is virtually all that developers have ever built. [1]

The article is completely missing the domino effect, and why "mostly building
high-end housing in desirable locations" is still helpful. Where there is
high-income job-creation (like SF or NYC) there WILL be wealthy people moving
in. You can either (a) build nice new houses for them, or (b) let them buy up
the existing stock of housing and displace everyone who is lower than them on
the economic ladder. That's the part that's basic supply and demand.

Thus the domino effect - with fixed supply the wealthy displace the less
wealthy.

Where I think the article is really missing the point is in its failure to see
how restricting housing in the hottest job markets just makes the domino
effect even broader. If it were feasible for San Francisco to soak up all the
tech jobs it probably would. Instead, many "mid market" companies are being
displaced to secondary hubs like Seattle and Austin, where -- shocker -- they
have similar restrictive policies and are experiencing exactly the same
housing crisis and displacement problem just with scaled down dollar amounts
involved.

American cities - and many others around the world - are dealing with
fundamental problems of scaling. In the industrial era we were a bit better at
scaling up: we built simple grids that could be extended indefinitely, and
when the technology came around we built trams and subways to help move people
about the region. The building codes of the era allowed neighborhoods to
change over time so long as the health and safety standards were met.

And then we fell in love with our cars, adopted the suburban car-oriented
pattern and passed laws that mostly forbid the development of anything else.
That pattern is specifically designed _not_ to change over time - so we
shouldn't be suprised when it buckles under the load of steady population
growth.

[1]: [https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2018/7/25/why-are-
develo...](https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2018/7/25/why-are-developers-
only-building-luxury-housing)

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RenRav
The cost of living in a lot of cities is horrible, even if you can afford
housing.

I think the commute from beyond the city, where housing is more affordable and
zoning more permissive, could be improved and promoted as a compromise.

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NN88
doesn't matter. zoning is the issue. if you don't have more density, you won't
have ANY opportunity for housing access.

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timwaagh
its supposed to be a solution for homelessness.

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stale2002
This article kinda misses the point.

Even _if_ your only goal is to produce more affordable/low income housing, and
you do not believe that market rate housing helps, you _still_ have to admit
that upzoning helps with the problem.

This is because in major cities, like San Francisco, there are low income
housing requirements for many new housing projects.

Or in other words, if a company builds an expensive apartment complex, they
might be required to make 20% of those apartments as affordable housing stock.

Therefore, upzoning areas still definitely creates more affordable housing
stock (because of that 20%), and should therefore be desirable for people who
care about this issue.

I am sure that many developers would increase the percentage of affordable
housing that they create, if they were offered height limit relaxations in
return. Ie, they can build that 30 story apartment complex, that was
disallowed previously, if they make ~30% affordable.

Housing upzoning efforts should be focused on these unilateral wins that help
everyone.

