This sounds plausible, and it chimes with the article's statement that the new supply is at the high end. Thanks! If people were only blocking certain kinds of development, that would explain why low-end prices stay high even while there's a lot of construction causing the median price to drop.
I think of it as: NIMBYism keeps high-density zoned land high value, so the floor never comes out of the market, even if you squish the top down.
Houses don't belong in (the core of) major metros anymore, but there are a lot of wealthy home owners who live there, and have built up political networks over decades or centuries.
It's a tragedy of our system that we let 20 residents keep out 200.
Should the 20 just be bought out, or forced to sell, or allowed to rezone and then sell one by one (with the first person getting the most money, as each lot is turned into a high rise).
We are facing some of this in the city in which I live and I don't really know how to address it (I can see validity in the arguments of both sides) so was wondering what you see as the path forward.
I'm generally leery of things like eminent domain, because they can be very problematic. On the other hand, there's a good chance that converting a lot of blocks also means we need to up utility capacity in the area, which can be very disruptive for residents, so it also makes sense to rebuild an area at a time.
I like the idea of having the city nominate regions, and then any time 90% of a block agrees, the whole block is sold as a unit (or maybe auctioned with minimum bid) and rezoned at that time. (This kind of idea meshes well with the development plan of having several high density clusters smattered around the city as neighborhood focal points, which is what my city recently switched to.)
It doesn't quite fix the utilities problem or some people being forced out, but I think it balances out a lot of competing forces reasonably, and keeps us from working with weird lots during development (as the city can repartition the block during rezone).
