This really isn't going to change, because it requires people with control to voluntarily sabotage their personal investments. Liberal or conservative, it doesn't matter. All groups of people like to preserve and grow their own wealth.
Even worse is the absolute fuckery from the fed*, which has now created a "Have and Have Not" home owner situation. Where those who are blessed have insanely valuable 3% mortgages on pre-inflation home purchases, and the Have Nots are stuck looking at high rates on heavily appreciated home values. If they can even find a home - you'd have to be forced or brain damaged to give up your juicy 3% mortgage.
So what is the solution?
There really isn't one. The government will do the same old trick of passing "feel good affordable home" legislation, that ultimately does noting, because you cannot make housing affordable without lowering the value of your voters homes.
*This is in reference to the fed being the entity that makes fixed rate mortgages possible. That cost must be borne somewhere, and it is now being carried by non-homeowners. Banks sure as shit wouldn't give out fixed low rates if they couldn't dump them on the fed's balance sheet.
The Fed's mandates are full employment and price stability. The benchmark rate and their ability to buy various flavors of securities (bonds, etc) are the only tools at their disposal. The US economy is at full employment and almost back to the 2% inflation target ("soft landing"). If there was more supply of housing, higher mortgage rates would drive down asset values, but there isn't enough supply (for various; reasons the country has underbuilt for two decades, people tied to their low rate mortgages who won't move now, etc).
If you can coax new supply on the market at sufficient quantity, those transactions at these money rates will drag down comparables via lower price transactions over time. How quickly is a function of new supply velocity.
The only idea I have is a new mortgage program that allows someone who is selling to finance another home to keep their mortgage rate on a portion of the new mortgage. For instance, I have a 3% mortgage on a $300,000 home. I want to sell it and purchase a $700,000 home. I can sell my home for $500,000. Current mortgage rate is 7%. If I could sell my home and purchase the new one with a mortgage that is 3% on 300,000 and 7% on the additional 200,000 I think it would make selling quite a bit more enticing. This scenario is assuming I would put the $200,000 I made in equity as a down payment and I am ignoring fees/commissions for simplicity sake.
It is possible and voters do support it. Nobody has lost an election for being a YIMBY yet. But the trick is that it has to be done by legislation at non-local levels, because voters only try to restrict competition at local levels.
> because you cannot make housing affordable without lowering the value of your voters homes.
That would be deflation, but we can still have disinflation. If housing prices stop increasing, then they'll increase by less than wage growth, making them more affordable.
Also, voters may realize that increasing the value of their homes doesn't make them richer if it also increases the price of other homes they want/need to move to.
Wage growth can never make housing more affordable. This is such a common misconception. You can't "pay workers" your way out of a housing crisis. Give everyone $10k more a year and houses prices simply jump to accommodate it.
You have to build new housing. It is literally the only fix (other than population decline).
Ah, the myth of the sentient house price. Look at those clever little house prices! Somehow they just know that workers all got an extra $10k/yr. You can't fool them!
Look, prices don't control themselves. They go up because buyers choose to spend more and because sellers choose to demand more. It's not automatic, and its not inevitable, but changing it requires a values shift.
Parent is correct generally speaking. It's not that the prices are sentient, it's that sellers (of anything) are always charging as much as they can for their house and not a dollar less. If everybody suddenly has an extra 10K, the seller will notice that through an increase in bids for their house at price X, and a single surviving bid at price X+10K (the person who would have bought the house at X before everybody got the 10K). The option for the person who has X+10K would be to lose the bid, but they know they would face stiff competition at X for their next purchase attempt, thus they will eventually accept the higher price given that they have the money.
Of course, this is an oversimplification. But looking at the market as a whole, the more money people have to spend, the more you can charge for the house.
House prices are not sentient. Humans are sentient, and given a value (+) system that prioritizes individual return on investment via maximising sale price, yes, more income on the part of buyers will cause buyers to be willing to pay more, and sellers to require more. But these are human decisions, and there are other outcomes possible.
(+) moral, philosophical, personal values, not financial values
> voters may realize that increasing the value of their homes doesn't make them richer if it also increases the price of other homes they want/need to move to.
Folks planning to use their home equity for things that don't require them to move do, in fact, end up richer. For example: a higher home value allows one to borrow more for e.g. college for one's offspring or to start a business, provides for a larger inheritance (or donation) from one's estate, etc. Home equity is real money that people do use without selling their homes.
This is both temporally and geographically myopic.
Temporally: in the late 1990s, I had a mortgage with a 7.25% rate. These days, I'm one of the Haves. While I may have done better than many of my peers due to my work history, a lot of people my age, or more precisely, people who bought houses when 7.25% was considered a deal not to be missed, are in the same position.
Geographically: billions of people around the world rent rather than own, and for the most part it does not hamper their "personal investments".
Granted, getting from a place/time where people expect owning a house for 5 years to show 50-100% gains to one where a house is unlikely to gain value at all will be challenging. But we can take it slowly and minimize the pain while maximizing the gain of backing out of this insane way of treating housing.
> in the late 1990s, I had a mortgage with a 7.25% rate. These days, I'm one of the Haves. While I may have done better than many of my peers due to my work history, a lot of people my age, or more precisely, people who bought houses when 7.25% was considered a deal not to be missed, are in the same position.
Inflation adjusted, when you last paid 7.25% in the mid 90s, house prices were far lower. Today, buyers entering the market for the first time are getting smacked with high rates & record high purchase prices in many markets thanks to two decades of ultra low interest rates.
Not denying that at all. But this wasn't laid out in the GP comment, which contrasted people from the "before" time and the "have-nots" in a higher rate environment.
There are many other things about the mid-2020s that differ from the 1990s, but interest rates alone are not a determinant of someone's lifetime economic trajectory.
As a young Have Not, I'm just waiting this one out. I see 1 of 2 options in the future:
1. Prices go down because nobody can buy the homes at their current prices given current interest rates
2. Prices stay up because large buyers scoop up the homes. Over time, fewer and fewer Americans actually own homes. Eventually the majority of voters will be Have Nots and the scales of power will tip.
It's not mega investors who are buying most homes. Most homes are just going to people that saved a fuckload of money over the pandemic or people that already have a home and can use its equity to get another one. The economy is doing very well, I don't think there will be any shortage of people who want homes, even at current interest rates and prices.
History says that #2 is where we are heading. That was Piketty's main thesis in Capital in the 21st Century. The era of relatively inequality we saw after WW2 was an aberattion. We are returning to the historical norm of high-inequality.
Still remains to be seen how much closer we have to get to feudalism before anything happens to change our trajectory.
Building housing is expensive, especially when financed traditionally Wich needs to be made back. Government subsidies could make it trivially cheap to build housing. We just have to get over that S word.
Get rid of zoning, stop financializing homes as a financial asset, and this problem will go away. The market is actually pretty good at solving this issue. If homes get expensive, they'll replace houses with apartments and condos, or build more homes. This will increase supply to keep up with demand.
Exactly this. And, a hard look at building construction standards in regards to HVAC, electrical and plumbing could help too. Plumbing is about $5.25 sq/ft for new construction [1] and electrical is about $9 sq/ft [2]. On a 2,000 sq/ft house, this is almost $30,000 alone. Permit costs should be looked at too. In my city, permit costs alone are $5,000 [3]. Permitting also has a hidden cost, because frequently in my city, the inspections take months. My neighbor's 1800 sq/ft 2bed 2 bath house build took two years, most of it spent waiting for inspections. This increases costs substantially.
The fixed costs of building keep rising, so there is no point in building a minimum code sized house (you have some really great houses in 700 sq ft). Nobody will build a 700 sq ft house because the fixed costs are such that the per sq ft goes plaid.
It really is such a shame. Houses just keep getting bigger. I would love a modern 1200 square foot house, but I would either have to buy a 1960s home with all the issues that come with it, or pay 2-3x per sqft of a "Master Planned Community"
What issues are you worried about a 1960s home having?
I can think of a few things that might be issues with some houses that old, but they are all things that your inspector would find.
A home that old is unlikely to have any original appliances, and has a good chance to have been upgraded to 200 amp electrical service. The roof has probably been replaced a couple times. So for all that it isn't really much different than buying a house that is maybe 10 years old.
Some things might be grandfathered in from earlier codes, which can be a little annoying but in most cases probably won't cause problems.
Insulation might not be up to current standards, which could be a problem depending on the climate.
Inspectors would find them, perhaps, but not much you can do about it.
Some examples of issues with older homes:
* Older, just general wear and tear
* Asbestos
* Insufficient heating/cooling
* Badly designed insulation
* Low number of outlets per room
* Smaller rooms
* Annoying layout (basement washer/dryer, etc)
The real sweet spot is probably to hire a builder to build exactly what you want, but you need to wait for a downturn when they're available (they make much more money smashing out nearly identical developments).
What is it in the building codes that you think should be dispensed with? I follow them to a moderate degree, and my impression is that (1) the major costs are labor (which I find appropriate) (2) most the requirements that have been added in, say, that last 3-4 decades are welcome and positive.
I would welcome a honest review from a qualified third party. Picking one example out of thin air, I'd say AFCI breakers are overkill and add a fair amount of cost.
For HVAC, requiring a fused disconnect within 6ft of the unit is overkill when the panel with an appropriate shutoff is already located in an accessible area.
The code requirements make things safer in probably 90% of the situations. But they also increase the cost substantially. With the affordability crisis in housing, I think we should look for places where a small reduction in safety can yield big savings on cost.
I think a _LOT_ of safety is overstated. I'd be curious for an assessment of code-preventable fatalities of home occupants from, say, the 1960s until today.
I'd be shocked if the cumulative building codes since then to today could be shown to save even a single year of, say, 2022 of automobile fatalities (about 43,000 people).
Replying to myself, I know, but then how about we work out how many fatalities are occurred due to housing affordability? Code costs need to consider that too; since increasing costs means less people get houses to live in. And homeless people have a dramatically shorter life expectancy than housed people.
I live in one of my city's ever-expanding historic preservation areas. I can't actually fix the front of my old house without permission. Or remove the nonsense purely-decorative dormer because the city historian will only trust photographs and not evidence of moderns construction materials.
The owner in the 80s needed a permit from the historic preservation board to add the dormer. It's the same historic preservation board I need permission from to remove the dormer. Ironically, the history board doesn't have any of its own records before the early oughts, so they don't believe they issued a permit. (I talked with the old owner back in ~1992 about the odd dormer and heard a lot about permits back then.)
I would love to have that particular board of busybodies disbanded.
I'm not an expert in this area, but some municipalities have restrictions on cheaper construction techniques (e.g. requiring copper piping instead of PEX for plumbing, EMT conduit instead of Romex for wiring). This is often due to union influence instead of any safety reason.
Given that you are required to be a licensed electrician to work in more or less any municipality that has a building code, unions requiring <harder, more expensive thing> instead of <easier, cheaper thing> seems less important. Most of the times I've dug in and researched these "unions are holding us back" claims, they tend to generally evaporate.
Also, given the way shrinkflation and related phenomena work, do you actually believe that if a municipality went from banning PEX to allowing it, the prices of new homes in its boundaries would go down?
I tried to find a house in our nearby bigger city. The prices were 100k higher than I was planning on spending, and also had upwards of a 1 year wait to close because they were being used as a rental property.
Instead, I was able to find a house in the nearby smaller town's outskirts. However that means that I live in the county, as I did before. It also means I have no say in the town's elections, nor do I have any say in the city's elections. And I'm 2000 feet away from the town, yet cant vote there.
And I even worked in person in the bigger city, and lived in a trailer park 3 miles away from the city square, yet 1/3 of a mile away from the city. I spent 40 hours a week there, and no voting rights. I deserve a quarter of a vote given my taxes went there, and I was there quarter of my living hours.
The ones who can afford to live there are the ones enforcing terrible laws, and are gatekeeping the rest of us out.
> I deserve a quarter of a vote given my taxes went there
The City of London does this. It doesn’t work in America: you can easily defuse it by claiming they’re votes for corporations or point to a random wealthy person in the suburbs.
> Get rid of zoning, stop financializing homes as a financial asset, and this problem will go away.
While I don’t disagree with you, you’re saying this like it is the easy part. It’s probably political career suicide for anyone who proposed getting rid of zoning and there isn’t really any way to stop homes from being a financial asset (because what would then be the point of home ownership)? Big building projects can take a decade or more so you wouldn’t likely see enough new housing stock to make a real difference in home prices for a generation or two. Mortgage rate increases have done nothing more than stall and slightly decrease home prices but now you have a higher mortgage payment. Currently, people who have a “starter home” or townhouse etc have no incentive to move up in house size which because of higher rates. This was previously very important for younger or less well off people to be able to afford something to own. I think a new mechanism needs to be developed that could incentivize people to sell their homes.
> Big building projects can take a decade or more so you wouldn’t likely see enough new housing stock to make a real difference in home prices for a generation or two
This is a problem of permitting. Let developers build and you’ll see housing within two years.
By definition owning a home means them being a financial asset, so that part of the post was on its face meaningless. I expect that the point was "investment asset" which is just not possible, prices go up and down. Unfortunately for all, up too much for too long and the market seizes. Blame the money laundering and asset parking for the market shifts, no one wants to spend all the money they do. Then spread the greed all around to everyone who didn't sell for a lower price a long time ago.
Sure but being a homeowner can require huge amounts of money be spent on maintenance and upkeep that isn’t required of renters. Homeowners gladly (or grudgingly) spend a lot of money and time/effort in order to protect their investment.
Certainly, and that's one reason people choose to be renters.
People in other parts of the world where real estate doesn't always/ever appreciate in value the way it has in the Anglosphere over the last 40 years also have to spend a lot of money and time/effort ... and they do it anyway.
> It’s probably political career suicide for anyone who proposed getting rid of zoning
Where I live, local developers run local politics. The developers would rejoice! If it happened to be political suicide for anyone along the way, I'm sure they could find new politicians to run.
> stop financializing homes as a financial asset ... The market is actually pretty good at solving this issue.
"financializing" in this case is a scare word describing the functioning of markets. not sure how you finance the apartments you're constructing without "financializing."
I think the point of the original comment was that in the US we setup a system where the default way to build wealth is to buy a primary residence and wait for it to appreciate in value.
The "financialzing" is just that we decided owning a home was the best way for the middle class to build wealth.
The downside of this is now every homeowner wants their residence to go up in value. So they support policies that encourage that. We've done that for so long, few people can afford to buy a home anymore.
The alternative would be to
1) not have the gov involved in incentivizing homeownership
2) change zoning and permitting policies to encourage much much more supply
Yes, there would be financial instruments involved in all of this. But it might look more like car ownership, where the asset depreciates over time. (Like is often the case in Japan with housing).
But housing would not be something people look at as a way to build wealth.
However, you could still make money building housing, apartments, etc. Or even owning apartment buildings and charging people to live in them.
> But it might look more like car ownership, where the asset depreciates over time. (Like is often the case in Japan with housing).
This is becoming less true over time. Japanese houses depreciated because they had terrible quality / no insulation / they kept updating the earthquake codes, but they've grown larger and are fairly decent now.
But more importantly, in either place it's not the house that appreciates but the land under it. So the best policy to prevent this is a land value tax, but this very much annoys people who would like to make unproductive use of land they own, ie residential landlords or retirees.
As much as I am a fan of Henry George's basic take on things, I also have an issue with the fundamental concept of "productive use of land". To require that any use of a piece of land generates sufficient income to pay taxes on that land which reflect the highest financial value it could have ... just seems wrong to me.
I don't want all land in its most productive use, and neither, I suspect, does the rest of the world.
Well, that requires (to some degree) majority support for the subsidy and thus the thing. If a minority (or even just 1 person) has a patch of land, and is perfectly sincere about want it to be less-than-maximally (financially) productive, they will have to pay the full price.
It's true that this problem doesn't arise under Georgist tax policies (AFAIU) for public land, so there's that. But I still feel a little uneasy about making land preservation by individuals prohibitively expensive.
> land preservation by individuals prohibitively expensive.
Only if that land preservation is in the middle of the city ("land preservation" that typically looks like gated-in parking lots). Nature access can and is subsidized in the city.
You're missing the main point of Georgism. The main thing is that community-derived wealth (i.e. the value of land, not the value of the property on that land) should be redistributed to the community, as the community was the one that caused that increase in wealth.
Someone can maintain a piece of land unproductively if they want to. They just have to pay for that right, same as anyone else that would want to own that piece of land.
There is a broad range of situations here. No one should want a blighted property just sitting there in places like NYC or LA where homelessness is rampant. However, no one is arguing to just teardown places like Central Park to put in more housing.
If anything, I would say it would mark a 're-financialization' of assets if we were to stop doing that, as given that the government owns pretty much all mortgages we're not talking about an actual financial market in mortgage debt as they normally function.
I think building materials, labor, and land is increasing prices. So the market cannot meet demand and is partly causing the problem.
I do think cities can work on accelerating permits and zoning, but cities are strapped for funding to assign people to help with this. Again, shortage of workers.
Down the street from us, is a nice land that has been parceled, they cleared and leveled the land, laid sewer, underground electricity, all set to build houses. Only one problem, the demand for housing has crashed, due to the market. 6 houses all set to be built, completely stalled.
>> stop financializing homes as a financial asset
I don't understand. Isn't this dictated by the market?
> accelerating permits and zoning, but cities are strapped for funding to assign people to help
Permits are one of the few municipal services where this argument doesn't make sense. Permits aren't free, after all. Permit revenue scales with the number of permit applications. A city overwhelmed with permit applications by definition has more money to hire staff to work the permitting process.
> A city overwhelmed with permit applications by definition has more money to hire staff to work the permitting process.
Let's say you are paid "appropriately", and that your income comes from the fee payments associated with the tasks you complete. You're fully occupied, and the income from fees matches the expenses (including your salary). Things are in balance, so to speak.
Now we increase the number of fee payments by 80%. You can no longer complete all the associated tasks in any reasonably time frame, but the fee payments will not pay for an additional full time member of staff.
> Only one problem, the demand for housing has crashed, due to the market. 6 houses all set to be built, completely stalled.
Are you kidding? They're is good if demand for houses. Maybe not at the price they originally thought they could get for it, but that doesn't mean the demand is gone.
A larger portion of monthly payments now go to interest instead of principal since rates have climbed, but houses are still way more expensive in terms of monthly payments than they were 2 years ago.
The demand is still there, people just can't afford it.
> building materials, labor, and land is increasing prices
In most high-cost housing markets, this isn’t true [1]. Land value appreciation dominates construction cost factors. In my case, structure is 10% of the value of my home—I could rebuild the structure for 10% of the house’s value.
> don't understand. Isn't this dictated by the market?
Americans treat their houses as an asset. So we vote for policies that increase housing prices in real terms. Contrast that with Japan, where housing is a depreciated asset.
> I think building materials, labor, and land is increasing prices
Denser housing provides more functional housing for a given amount of material, labor, and land. For example, if you're building a townhouse, you just need a 10 inch wall instead of two 8 inch walls. That's less material and labor.
> the demand for housing has crashed, due to the market
The demand for housing that can be supplied within the context of the given regulations has crashed. If you allow people to build more efficient housing, then it could be financially viable again.
Near my house (Seattle) they recently built 12 townhomes, just as you describe and the prices for them is US$900k. While they are slightly less than a single family home, affordability is not a key word I would use.
These townhomes, are still available and not selling quickly.
Not saying that building won't alleviate problems but people must understand there's a lower limit to home prices, considering labor/material and investment costs...
That argues that how we pay for housing to be built is currently broken. One solution is for the government to subsidize the building of housing, which would let prices go below that lower limit.
The lack of zoning directly contributed to the damage or destruction of more than 150 homes during the 2020 houston chemical explosion. Zoning exists for very important life safety reasons the market cannot account for.
That can be dealt with by environmental laws. Zoning exists to keep minorities out of whites-only neighborhoods. As in, when zoning was implemented this is the reason they said they were doing it and you can just go back and read the meeting minutes.
As an example, the most famous restaurant in California is called "French Laundry" because "French laundries" were a way of signaling they were owned by white people, so white customers could go to them without accidentally supporting a Chinese immigrant business. But there's no environmental risk in allowing a corner store or a Chinese laundry in a residential neighborhood.
Could you say more about your claim that zoning exists to keep minorities out of white-only neighborhoods? Specifically, do you mean to say that all zoning laws exist for this purpose, or only some of them? And do you mean that all zoning laws still exist for this purpose, or that that was their original intent? And I assume your claim is specifically meant to apply with respect to the U.S., and not to other countries who've had zoning laws in place for thousands of years. Hypothetically, would you say that the U.S. would have ignored the precedent for zoning laws that came from, e.g., England if they did not provide a convenient way to keep minorities out of whites-only neighborhoods? Would we be living in a zoning-free society if not for racism?
> Could you say more about your claim that zoning exists to keep minorities out of white-only neighborhoods?
As I said, you can just go read the meeting minutes when they were introduced in the early 20th century and it's why they said they were doing it.
But there's a book called The Color of Law about it.
> And do you mean that all zoning laws still exist for this purpose, or that that was their original intent?
They still exist because they haven't been removed yet and the SCOTUS precedent (Euclid v Ambler) that authorizes them hasn't been overruled. Racial covenants on individual properties were removed, but not that.
> precedent for zoning laws that came from, e.g., England
To be clear, England doesn't have zoning, it has /much worse ideas/ where you can't do anything without planning permission and the US is a big improvement over it. (Urban growth boundaries are okay though, but the US has national parks so we're cooler.)
> Would we be living in a zoning-free society if not for racism?
We would still have things that you probably think of as zoning but are not actually zoning. For instance, it's legal to have a corner store in a housing district in any given old quaint European country, and Japan has some light forms of zoning strictly controlled at the national level so individual cities don't get big ideas about becoming exclusive.
When people say get rid of zoning, generally what they mean is to move to an intensity based zoning scheme. i.e. One where the zone indicates the "maximum" type of construction that may be built.
i.e. in low rise residential zones you can only build low rise housing and small shops, in high rise residential you can still build low rise residential, in commercial you can build large commercial spaces but you can still build residential, and in "light industrial" zones you can build non-hazardous industrial structures but you can still build everything else. However for full blown industrial you can only build industrial due to the hazards.
In practice that looks a lot like just getting rid of zoning entirely with the exception that traffic management works out a little better and actually dangerous industrial sites are still kept away from everything else.
"Do not build residential buildings in unsafe places" is not the same kind of zoning as "do not build apartment units because I don't want to live within walking distance of some poorer people".
I think there's a huge difference when zoning in broad-strokes ways (ie residential here, and dangerous chemical plants here) and zoning in micro-targeted, social engineering ways, (ie. mixed-use only here, condos here, single-family here, townhomes here, etc.)
The hyper-growth 1940s and 1950s that tore up a century of development across a lot of cities left us empowered activists of the 1960s and 1970s that overcorrected policies and laws and gave way too much power to neighborhoods to dictate all kinds of things they really shouldn't have had the power to dictate.
There is very little “free” about the housing market- the supply side is incredibly regulated, often at the requests of home owners who treat their home equity as a savings account.
The market is how it exists, not in some libertarian fantasy of unfettered exchange. If there’s money to be made bribing politicians to prevent housing from being built or turning every single family home into a rental, the market will coalesce toward those ends. But feel free to tell me how you’re going to dismantle homes owner and investment firm power over the US political class and create a world where home values are flat or go down. The political party who did this would be immediately cast out of office.
I don’t disagree with any of that, I merely disagree that the anything resembling a free market created these issues through increased financialization. That is a symptom of the underlying issues you mentioned.
I was about to call bullshit on your assertion about removing zoning. I did a quick look comparing Houston, which has no zoning laws at all, vs Dallas.
Houston also still has other extremely expensive requirements like parking minimums.
The national traffic engineers' guides for parking are based on some of the most made up statistics you've ever seen and feature things like parking requirements for bars, as if they were trying to encourage drunk driving.
> feature things like parking requirements for bars, as if they were trying to encourage drunk driving.
I wonder if anybody's ever actually used that to say the State and Feds support inebriated driving, since they require parking for bar patrons. This place is for drinking alcohol, and the last thing that should be included is parking for the drinking customers.
Noise in neighborhoods is caused by cars and not by anything else. There's some issues like partying neighbors, gas leafblowers, and the tendency of houses to be made of wooden sticks with no insulation, but they're much less important.
I feel like that ignores some important contextual factors like how Houston is a constantly flooding swamp where you can practically swim through the air in the summer.
"Since the 1960s, Turkey has permitted periodic legal exemptions to developers and property owners, allowing them to bypass safety certification by paying a fee. At least 75,000 buildings in the affected earthquake zone were found to have received construction amnesties.May 17, 2023"
Architectural engineering and zoning are orthogonal. As an example, zoning is about how tall a NYC skyscraper can be, engineering is about it not falling over. Your article is about the latter.
Really - I didn't read it that way at all. Sure the engineering was shitty because they wanted it cheap. Developers were allowed to bypass normal Zoning and other Regulations (building codes) that required certain engineering and inspections by paying a fee. The end result was quickly built buildings that in a big quake crushed human occupants.
I think most of the Zoning laws are about what purposes the building can serve. Like do you really want a meat packing plant built in your neighborhood or a fireworks factory? Now there maybe overly restrictive Zoning but having no Zoning is likely not a good idea.
Not speaking for OP, but when people are commenting on affordability and talk about getting rid of zoning, they typically mean "making it easy to build residential dwellings in areas zoned residential." Unfortunately, this is not the case in much of the country now. For example, if you own a single-family home, you are not likely able to:
- convert it to a duplex, triplex, or quadplex without changing the footprint of the building
- build an ADU for another resident on your property, even if it will fit and otherwise be up to code
- tear your house down and build a 5-story residential building
These codes aren't about preventing meatpacking plants from being built in residential neighborhoods as much as they are about creating an artificial ceiling on the number of residents of a residential neighborhood.
Zoning only defines what type of buildings you can make. Building codes set the requirements for how they are constructed. Removing zoning does not require weakening building codes.
I see these first two arguments very often in online discourse but I've yet to have the zoning thing really explained. Zoning isn't why we have millions upon millions of homes sitting empty, it's the second one you've listed: that homes are treated as financial assets first, and a requirement for a life well lived second. So fair enough, then let's stop that. Tax the absolute hell out of vacant homes at rates so high it's financially disastrous to hold them as assets. Then the price of homes will crash as corporate landlords/holders dump stock to avoid the bill.
Millions of homes are sitting empty because they are in places people don't want to live or don't have jobs that allow them to afford their lives.
> Tax the absolute hell out of vacant homes at rates so high it's financially disastrous to hold them as assets
Higher taxes on homes - regardless of the action being taxed, will not get you to where we need to be on housing unless they are paired with subsidies. We already are not building enough of them, we should not be imposing higher costs unless we are prepared to offset it elsewhere. Vacancy taxes might be part of the solution, but they also encourage sparser living to occupy more homes simultaneously.
> Millions of homes are sitting empty because they are in places people don't want to live or don't have jobs that allow them to afford their lives.
I have a feeling it's much more the second than the first there. I know some people are picky but I have a hard time imagining a person who would willingly choose homelessness because they're just that committed to a given area.
> Higher taxes on homes - regardless of the action being taxed, will not get you to where we need to be on housing unless they are paired with subsidies.
I'm proposing higher taxes on houses, not homes. The difference being the former is held as stock to be sold later, and the latter is lived within by it's owner (or someone who has a business relationship with the owner.)
> We already are not building enough of them, we should not be imposing higher costs unless we are prepared to offset it elsewhere.
In what way in your mind is someone under my suggestion spending more money to build a home?
> Vacancy taxes might be part of the solution
That's literally what I've suggested. Taxing homes that are vacant.
> I have a feeling it's much more the second than the first there. I know some people are picky but I have a hard time imagining a person who would willingly choose homelessness because they're just that committed to a given area.
People need and want to live in a place where it is affordable for them to live. That includes the costs of provisioning services and the jobs available to them.
People will obviously pick homelessness in the city (where they can access services) over literally not being able to have food in the places lots of these houses are (because you need a car to access services and services are sparse/nonexistent).
> The difference being the former is held as stock to be sold later, and the latter is lived within by it's owner (or someone who has a business relationship with the owner.)
When a house is constructed or sold it is definitionally being held to be sold later, so your suggestion would just impose costs on new construction.
> That's literally what I've suggested. Taxing homes that are vacant.
Right, and this was the part where I was agreeing with you.
But vacancy taxes have been shown to be insufficient at increasing the number of people housed.
I mean a place to live doesn't mean anything if there's nowhere for them to work to earn a living to afford it, not to mention being able to commute in a rural area basically requires a car of some sort.
Homeless congregate to cities because they can get the widest exposure to panhandle on. This isn't complicated. If you have no income apart from what's given to you, you need to be in places where a lot of people are a lot of the time to maximize your income. I'm sure plenty of them would happily move to a different area, if they're given the tools and resources to build a life there. But we don't do that. We just sick the cops on them and burn whatever they've managed to cobble together and tell them to go somewhere else. They might, MIGHT, get a bus ticket. But that's it and that solves none of their problems, it just makes them a problem for a different metro.
I personally prefer with more aggressive zoning laws that prohibits high population density residency. What I would prefer to see instead is to designate affordable residential zones much more widely and implement very aggressive policy (which we do not have now unfortunately) to incentivize people to move into that new zones effectively (Of course, that's what public officials have been trying to do, but so far no one has achieved that to satisfactory standards). High population density city, I believe, actually exacerbates lots of problems that SF or NY cities currently have. I theorize that if you get rid of zoning and relax construction regulations, according to Pareto distribution, more people will flow into the highly desirable places easily and that will eventually lead to much higher housing prices and more problems that are associated with high density area.
> aggressive policy (which we do not have now unfortunately) to incentivize people to move into that new zones effectively
This is urban sprawl. It’s what we’ve been doing for decades. It’s a social, environmental and economic disaster.
Low density works for the very rich (can put through the inefficiency) and destitute (who accept the lower standard of living). For the educated or middle income, who won’t accept a lower standard of living at higher cost, it’s a road to increased emissions, shorter lives and less choice on everything.
According to a principle that is fundamentally fucked? Lack of density causes that economic inefficiency, service dilution and environmental damage. There are cities that don’t have the problems America’s do, because they don’t implement these zoning policies. Which cause those problems.
Why would you hold onto a broken concept? You don’t even have to be considerate: you can keep low density for yourself, causing prices around you to spike, while supporting liberalisation in cities, where economic activity happens.
I don't believe it is either right or wrong to have zones. I believe there are both pros and cons of zoning to prevent high population density. From the first google search, I found the article about it (https://sustainablereview.com/high-population-density-pros-a...). You can also find dezoning of Seoul in South Korea (only example I am familiar with) and what damages it caused inadvertently (drastic population and housing prices increase in Seoul even with higher housing capacity provided by dezoning and allowing high rise apartments).
> there are both pros and cons of zoning to prevent high population density
You can’t have low population density everywhere, amidst population growth, without causing those problems. They’re inherent to supply and demand, logistics and transportation cost, and the geographic limits of civil services like police and fire.
You can have low density for the rich (same services, higher cost) or destitute (same cost, fewer services). But not everyone. Being selfish is okay—you can move to a place with a shrinking population or somewhere low density with high costs or lower your standard of living voluntarily. But forcing that everywhere, while ignoring the destitution and destruction it necessarily causes, is morally wrong. (It’s also ineffective.)
For what it’s worth, I moved from New York City to Jackson Hole. The latter is low density. But it’s expensive. And we have to subsidise housing for many people, paid for through property taxes, to keep even the small community sustainable and morally balanced. (Which makes it more expensive.) That means we need to accept that the cities should be unshackled, because our community couldn’t afford to sustain itself without the economic productivity of America’s urban cores.
I don't disagree with your points when it comes to housing quality in terms of the price. I am simply concerned about the effectiveness of housing price reduction by de-zoning and loosening regulation. There seems to be no data point that indicates that removing residential zone restrictions will lower the housing prices.
A funny thing about this is that despite being a popular American Dream-type desire it's literally communism, as in it's one of the points of the Communist Manifesto.
> 9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of all the distinction between town and country by a more equable distribution of the populace over the country.
The American idea of a single family home with a lawn and lot size needs to change. And the people that have these don't want new construction in the neighborhood that is dense. Homeowners are fighting back against multiplexes and apartment buildings, and especially against low-income housing.
> The American idea of a single family home with a lawn and lot size needs to change
There's nothing wrong with this vision, in fact allowing infill in certain neighborhoods will make it cheaper and easier to have large yards elsewhere. There aren't infinite people to fill infinite apartments!
There's not infinite land within commuting distance to the job centers. In the large metro areas almost all available land has been turned into single family homes. If we want to expand housing some people will need to live in multifamily.
as long as Americans generally hate each other, they will never make housing accessible as it invites the supposed riff-raff. sad, but true.
fun fact - you as an individual have disproportionate ability to block construction in your municipality.
in any case, despite all its problems, housing per sqft in America is still among the cheapest in the western hemisphere, let alone the world. expect things to get much worse. good luck.
> in any case, despite all its problems, housing per sqft in America is still among the cheapest in the western hemisphere, let alone the world. expect things to get much worse. good luck.
That's true because we just have so much land, so there's still empty space, but it's not true of areas where the good jobs are.
Having said that, it is worse in every other Anglo country (especially Ireland and the UK) because at least our zoning allows some by-right development, but they instead banned development entiely.
It struck me recently that this may be because people are flocking to cities - and the same cities that existed 100 years ago.
I don't have any statistics, but city dwelling must have exploded over the past 50 years or so. Economies used to be so much more based around agriculture and industry, even around WWII. Agriculture was less mechanized, needing more people, factories are often based away from big cities.
With these branches of economy in decline, more and more people are competing for the limited space in cities. And this surplus in demand doesn't easily lead to an increase of supply, as economics would dictate, because that would necessitate new cities.
We used to found new cities. Car makers in the US and Europe (Volkswagen for example), Milton Keynes in the UK is founded from scratch in 1950s. But no longer, and so "knowledge economy" workers, numbers ever increasing, will compete for proximity to the same few city centres as before.
Perhaps this is one advantage SV had in the early days (I've never been so might be very wrong here), but in the early days of SV, there was a lot of cities/towns to support a significant body of "knowledge economy workers". SV seems quite diversified, it's not like it is all based in SF, but there's lots of smaller towns that are sufficiently city-like. But of course that has a limit too, so it would seem like SV is past that saturation point too and in the same point as other urban areas.
To change this situation, we either need more remote work, or new cities. It'll be very interesting to see how the new Californian city fares. I won't hold my breath for the Saudi one - but of course you never know.
There are several factors in play in the US that put pressure on existing long-term residents.
- Rural/suburban -> city migration
- Immigration of wealthy people from all over the world to the US. California is an obvious and frequent destination for Pacific Rim peoples.
- REITs and other large investors snapping-up real estate only to idle it or rent it out at a premium.
- Zoning restrictions
- Massive open space preserves immediately adjacent to suburban and residential areas, blocking usable land for growth
- Lack of efficient, convenient, high speed public transit: CalTrain and VTA Light Rail are largely inconvenient for all but a small fraction of people. Faster, more efficient public transit allows housing to be more spread out. California has been promising high speed rail about as long as the flying car and fusion power have been "just around the corner".
There is another factor for older residents in California dissuading them from moving: losing Prop 13.
Another worrisome trend in US is the numbers of giant SUVs replacing mid-sized passenger cars. Vehicles that are heavier, less safe to pedestrians, less safe to drive, and less safe for occupants in a collision because they don't have to meet passenger car standards.
Yes, there are many factors. What I couldn't understand (and what I think my "brainwave" explains) is why excess demand barely moves the needle of supply. Usually if something is in short supply, it becomes more and more economical to produce it and sell it - increasing supply and decreasing prices.
Some of the factors you list decrease supply, but to me, the elephant in the room is that we don't seem to be able to create new cities - thus we're all competing for a fixed, small supply of land near the centres of a handful of high-status cities.
Different zoning, REITs and public transport are factors too, but these are merely resistors in the circuit, not switches IMHO.
…because housing has turned into a highly-financialized, speculative asset, whose value you drive up by limiting supply and through rentiering. When you can make more money from buying up homes and blocking construction than you can from building new ones, what results is the crisis we have. It’s the same in many countries (e.g. Canada).
If nothing changes I think the endgame is increasing ownership of housing by investment firms. As prices increase, they will be the only actors with consistent access to the kind of capital needed to buy real estate.
No one wants to say it, but immigration is a huge driver of housing un-affordability. Skilled H1b immigration and/or foreign buyers drives up home prices, and unskilled illegal immigration drives up rents.
Can you quantify this? I glanced at the percent of immigrants in the US population and the median house price/median income, but both graphs go all over the place over the decades.
Immigration flow must be governed by wage and employment metrics. Everyone fully employed at living wages? Open the spigot. Surplus domestic labor? Slowly close the spigot except for highly skilled workers (that you can prove are highly skilled an unattainable in the domestic market).
Otherwise, you're just driving down wages and boosting corporate/business profits with imported labor while exposing the government to domestic welfare program costs for unemployed and underemployed citizens.
No, immigration increases wages in all circumstances economists have ever studied, because they increase demand more than supply. Even true for mass migrant incidents where you aren't selecting them for skill. It helps that we tend to not let their families work when they come over, although that's kind of bad.
Please share a citation (or citations). 52 million Americans currently don't earn a living wage, forcing them to rely on social safety nets. Disingenuous to argue for more immigration when so many workers are already underpaid.
Yes, they don't earn a living wage because housing is too expensive; the issue is the "living" part. The nominal wage growth has actually been doing okay lately, by which I mean post-2019.
And immigration fixes that housing pressure how? This is no different than queues and backpressure. If housing is too expensive for tens of millions of workers, and supply lags, why would you increase housing demand? You must destroy demand until supply catches up.
Most of America doesn't have this housing pressure issue actually, only the top cities. And I believe you have the causation backwards; it's not "immigration would be bad because housing is rare" but rather "housing is expensive in California partly to keep immigrants out".
Some people say the immigrants will help because they'll contribute to construction. I think this is true but not an important point, and besides it probably annoys the construction unions to say it. Rather, immigrants can move to parts of the US that are cheap and starting to experience disinvestment, which is still most of it.
Besides that, housing isn't per-person, so if immigrants are more willing to live in families or have roommates it's less pressure than a lot of singles. And they pay taxes which you can use to build the housing.
Sex is a huge driver of housing un-affordability! Straight marriage is an unsustainable lifestyle choice /s.
> unskilled illegal immigration drives up rents.
Unskilled and being able to pay those higher rents sounds like they're delivering plenty of value and they're living in the area where they work so what right to you have to claim housing more than them?
It's a mixed bag. Immigrant labor (sometimes illegal) also builds the houses.
Second, while you're distracted worrying about who gets to come in to the US, you're going to ignore an equally important question: How can you get out?
It is just a curiosity how the 'business' side with money, has convinced the poor Christians that Jesus was for free-markets and guns. How do they do it? Is it all marketing and posturing? Why are US Christians so un-Christian and so easily fooled?
Not sure about free markets, but the Bible literally has Jesus telling poor people to sell their stuff until they can buy a sword for self-defense: https://www.bibleref.com/Luke/22/Luke-22-36.html
"Maybe this explains why Jesus replied with “that is enough” in Luke 22:38 upon hearing that the disciples already possessed two swords: their purpose was for show, not for action. (Alternatively, He may have been frustrated with their resolute tendency to accept His teachings literally)."
However, instead of thanking Peter for protecting Him, Jesus gives His disciple His own earful — of chastisement! “‘Put your sword back in its place,’ Jesus said to him, ‘for all who draw the sword will die by the sword” (Matthew 26:52). Additionally, He heals Malchus’ ear.
In general, when someone quotes a Bible verse, I read the whole chapter, to understand the context. This one seems to cry out for that, because it seems out of character as presented.
Here I attempt that. I think I arrive at a fairly convincing answer.
Luke 22 is the story of the Last Supper. It begins with Jesus' apostles planning the Passover feast. It includes the betrayal by Judas, and the handing over of Jesus to the Roman authorities. Here also are the famous words of the Eucharist.
When he tells his apostles to buy swords, it appears at one level that he is trying to muster a defense against the Romans who have come to capture him. Yet this does not completely make sense. Two swords seems inadequate, yet he says they are enough. And in the next line or two there is a mention of prophecy, so it is as though the purpose of the swords is not really to mount an effective defense, but to adhere to some earlier prophecy. But which prophecy?
(Some people have argued that the translation "sword" is wrong, but I think it is correct; it is a kind of short sword, a weapon.)
So what prophecy is this all done to fulfill? After some research, it appears to be Isaiah 53:12.
It is also worth reading Matthew 26, which is another account of the same events. In particular, Matthew 26:52 is relevant to this discussion: "Put up again thy sword into his place: for all they that take the sword shall perish with the sword."
So when we put all this together, what are we seeing? Jesus demands swords basically to be used as props, so that the events that transpire that night conform to the earlier prophecy of Isaiah.
Here we have a real man who is obsessed with living according to the written narrative. The Word made Flesh. In order to bring about good.
I think of left-activists who pay a lot of attention to the Image that they create at a protest. They themselves are probably thinking of someone like Tank Man. Often they bother me, seeming almost narcissistic. But there is an element of utilitarian consequentialism in this too. The Image does inspire others. Well, take this same thinking and put it into Judeo-Roman society around the turn of the millennium -- adapt it to the minds of these people with their religion -- and it makes perfect sense, doesn't it?
This is all about making real events conform to existing prophecy, so that they will take on powerful meaning.
It does raise another question for me, though: To what extent is the sword a deliberate provocation of the Roman authorities? Is this "suicide by cop"? Clearly he doesn't want his apostles to be killed (Matthew 26:52). But is the whole point to get himself killed, to satisfy the narrative? The whole framing is that these events have been prophecied and are inevitable. But are they? How much agency does Jesus have in this scene?
Most people who talk about the housing shortage using the term "housing shortage" find it unethical to suggest restricting the rate at which new people are allowed to settle in the United States.
"Americans can barely afford homes.. where they want to live." There, fixed it. America is full of affordable homes but they're not in cute little walkable communities. Zoning, demand, and density has driven up the price of homes in cities. People can afford homes, they just don't want to live in those places.
Agreed! Not everyone gets to live in a place with 10/10 schools, within 20 minutes of their work, and next to a "World-class Shopping Resort". Meanwhile small towns across America are shrinking into oblivion because they are "boring".
If we were to put just a hint of "Go West Young Man" spirit into the youth, in 20 years we would have thousands more beautiful, livable cities across America.
Did you know that, when the rail roads were built that there were hundreds of railway towns built. Many of which have high-speed internet (backbones laid in trans-continental railway easements in the 90's) and affordable homes. And, get this, have access to The Railway to ship goods to and from town. I feel like this is completely untapped potential in America today.
Also, did you know that, the population growth of every city in the world was negative until the 20th century (meaning people would die faster in the cities than the rate they were being born). America has only been an "Urban" collection of nations since the 1920's, meaning we are only now re-discovering how awful cities really are. We definitely should spread---out.
It also has to be affordable to live in those places where houses are cheap. If there are no nearby jobs, for example, it's just not viable even if the house is free.
If you're a young person who is hell-bent on owning a home, you should consider military service. The VA Loan is the easiest way into a mortgage with no money down, with location-specific terms to help you land a place to live in your hometown. Myself and my veteran friends (or their spouses) are the only people I "went to HS with" who are home owners today (now in our late 30's early 40's).
You can wish in one hand, or you can actually do something to help yourself achieve your dreams.
Browsing realtor.com makes it looks like a strange choice to set this article in Milwaukee. I'm looking at listings for habitable houses well under $100k, some below $50k.
There's a $44k listing that is not quite 20 blocks from the neighborhood where one couple stretched to buy. I would have loved for the author to write more about why a budget-conscious couple opted not to look at homes that could be purchased for under $350/mo, even at today's interest rates.
At those prices in Milwaukee those houses are in neighborhoods where the houses are constantly robbed. They may be cheap but they certainly are not conducive to raising a growing young family.
Here in the Netherlands we've had a supply shortage since WW2, which makes a supply shortage the status quo. There's no hidden conspiracy or grand government policy that causes it.
There's multiple root causes but an overlooked one is the delayed supply shock effect of an economic downturn.
During the crash years of 2008-2014, we pretty much stopped building. Because nobody was buying. This has created a backlog of a few 100K homes never built compared to what population growth would normally require.
It is this backlog that creates a boom 10 years later where for a few years in a row homes appreciate by 15-20% per year. They always appreciate a little, but it is mostly these price spike events that makes homes unaffordable.
So ideally, you keep building even during a downturn, but nobody can subsidize that. The budget would be eye-watering and would be coming at the time of budget cuts, not increases. We're already working on a new deficit. A lot of projects are stopped because due to the high interest rates, demand has crashed.
Similarly, a lot of well intended policies have the exact opposite effect. We're more heavily taxing citizens renting out their second homes. As it then becomes barely profitable, they just sell it. Even less rental homes.
We're heavily constraining investors that do big projects. Fair enough, we'll just not do the project then.
We even went as far as to mandate some new homes to be exclusively built for particular professions, say a teacher. They need affordable homes close to the city. A builder looks at this and will simply build the same home elsewhere, and sell it for a 100K more.
You can tweak taxes for newcomers on the market, giving them more budget to buy their first home. This makes houses more expensive, not cheaper.
And I'm not even addressing the political realities of government and municipality budgets depending on tax revenue based on current valuations (or at least high valuations), or the fact that the voter majority is aging and this being part of their retirement.
You can take somebody from GenZ and give them dictator powers and they still can't solve it, without the "solution" being worse than the problem.
You can't fix this. You can tweak and improve, but you cannot truly move the needle.
> A builder looks at this and will simply build the same home elsewhere, and sell it for a 100K more.
The obvious solution is for the government to subsidize housing. If the government puts 100K in towards the cost of building a house, then that developer can walk away with the same amount of money because it cost them 100k less to build.
Blocks some DNS resolvers. The person running it has some weird bone to pick he doesn't like that Cloudflare doesn't forward the requests subnet but only blocks Cloudflare not the dozens of other DNS resolvers that don't support it.
They actually don't even block they intentionally give bad ips back.
IIRC their argument is something like, they're acting exactly according to spec and Cloudflare is doing something weird/not according to spec that just happens to work everywhere else.
Nah the EDNS Client Subnet is explicitly optional and the RFC makes it very clear you're not required to implement it. They are very open that they, archive.is, are violating the spec. They maybe could justify a SERVFAIL but instead they just lie in the response.
It's actually funny from time to time archive.is works just fine via cloudflare I'm assume when whatever IP list archive.is is using happens to be missing some of cloudflares addresses. You can tell they use a specific cloudflare targeting list because issuing a DIG from you local computer without the EDNS Client Subnet works perfectly fine.
One aspect of the Philippines that amazed me was that you need to be Filipino to own land. Why this concept is so difficult to realize in the USA is baffling.
Remember kids, when you can't afford a home know that it is all Democrats fault for destroying the economy through inflation by printing money to bail out their friends and to pay for vaccines and war.
It has to do more with regulatory burdens in Democrat strongholds
https://youtu.be/ExgxwKnH8y4
Can't have your building cast a shadow on a school playground (you haven't paid bribes to the right city officials to get rid of their roadblocks)
Well, yeah. That's what we collectively get when we turn a place to live into a for-profit hellhole where 'Money' (read: asset companies, landlords, flippers, AirBNB scalpers) keep the supply so the rest of us can't actually live.
You all want to see the reality we have now? Go no further than "Married with Children", where a sole earner as a retail shoe salesman could have a 2 story house in a suburb with a car garage. Now, they'd be lucky for a 1 bedroom in a bad part of town. And this show wasn't about opulence - far from it. It was showing trashy white people and how "those" people live. And even they had a fucking house.
Same with The Simpsons. It was "normal" to have a 2 story house with a garage, in a suburb with 1 parent working out of the house, and 1 parent stay-at-home. This normal left us in the late 90's and went BOOM with the 2000 .com-bomb .
And you're getting squeezed HARD if you're in an apartment, trailer park, or trying to buy a house. Its not a place to live - it's a place to be a landlord and generate continual rent on those you're extorting. And with 40 years of deregulation and pro-capitalist pro-landlord actions and laws, this will only get worse and worse.
Biden is only the scapegoat for 40 years of terrible policy, that both the R's and D's both engaged in. Both parties extensively are part and engage in the landlord class. In fact, the constitution only initially allowed the landlord (land-owner) class to vote.
It's not an argument on houses in TV - it's showing that it was normalized enough that popular culture considered this normal.
But whatever. Shits fucked, and you're arguing over what I said was a depiction of the time? Of course it was a TV show. It was also believable in those days, even for lower class people.
What's worse is now, we look at them and we can't even see us owning a house, like a lousy shoe salesman could.
Seriously - can you imagine ANYONE surviving in a house or even an apartment on retail? That used to be true. No longer.
A lot of sitcoms were shot in front of studio audience so they used sets that were much bigger than the dwellings appropriate to the characters level of income and location. It's been noticed as early as 1953 in Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451. With time it became a trope and even the sitcoms w/o audience had these giant sets. Simpsons is heavily based off sitcoms.
The big elephant in the room is that the amount of people in the market has greatly increased because the population in this country exploded.
For instance, California population almost doubled since 1980 (25m to nearly 40m). And some cities have been built out in the 90s to the point where there is no more space (pretty much any city in Southern California comes to mind).
So yeah, given the smaller amount of inventory and more buyers, the basic economics state that the prices will rise.
> And some cities have been built out in the 90s to the point where there is no more space (pretty much any city in Southern California comes to mind).
The more space can be found in:
- any lot zoned R-1 that could be a duplex or better.
- the air above any single story building.
It's not difficult; just compare your city to somewhere like Tokyo or Barcelona, which are both much nicer.
Neither Tokyo or Barcelona are "nicer" than my hometown, though they certainly are different.
I know that when I watch [videos like this video on HK "Coffin Homes"](https://youtu.be/kUK11Yx3ugQ?si=nvuuCXrB3BlxKSFA) I'm thinking that I definitely am in love with my R-1 zoning laws. Also, 400sqft apartments are defiantly a thing in Tokyo and NYC... and, they're not even cheap! The reality is that More Appartments != Affordable housing and cramming more people into tight spaces is inhumane.
They're not cheap in NYC, but they are cheap in Tokyo's commuter zones, and generally speaking better in any non-Anglo country than in any Anglo country.
Overcrowding actually happens when you don't build enough housing. It causes more people to live in the same housing you already have.
I'm reminded of an Indian here in The States named Chief Black Kettle. During the failed negotiation of the land usage of the indigenous and the white settlers, which would eventually lead to his death and the massacre of his people, the white men simply could not understand why the Indians needed "so much land" and continued to reduce the amount of reservation would be granted.. until none was left at all.
The moral of the story is that a person's way of life is not defined by outsiders. "Efficient", "nicer", "Productive"... all sound like excuses for pushing people out of their homes and destroying their culture.
The Indians lived on this land for a thousand years without pollution or over crowding. Only once we started building and farming did these problems surface. So, "Overcrowding actually happens when you don't build enough housing." is obviously false. Overcrowding happens when you have too many people in the same space, as a tautology.
> So you want to take a situation which is nice for people living in their quiet neighborhoods and make it suck for absolutely everyone?
If you don't do this, your children are going to move to another state when they turn 18 and never visit, because they won't have anywhere to live. Neighbors aren't pollution, but your problem is too severe to even be worrying about them. Worry about your own family.
And Tokyo is quieter than your SoCal city because it doesn't have as many cars.
> Your solution is to start ripping out single family homes and building duplexes everywhere?
Absolutely. Luckily, it's too late for you, because we already did it in 2019 and it's already popular.
The single family homeowners are the ones developing the ADUs in this case. And if their homes get replaced by a 4-plex instead, well, they got paid because they sold their land for it.
> your children are going to move to another state
That will happen with your plan as well because they won't want to live in a dense dystopian population hellscape.
Maybe the solution is not to be ripping out homes and replacing them with duplexes, but rather building new cities.
Which is also already happening. Witness rise of cities (in SoCal) around Corona and San Bernardino, where very few lived only 20 years ago. That's because lots of people would rather live in a peace and quiet rather than hear their upstairs neighbor arguing with his wife.
Duplexes don't have upstairs neighbors, you're thinking of apartments.
Regardless it'll be fine; arguing with your wife is a generational-specific hobby of baby boomers, like how being in a band is specific to Gen Xers. (That's why husbands who hate their wives is the main joke in all those newspaper comics.)
Luckily, having cheaper housing makes it much safer to get divorced or leave an abusive relationship!
I live in California and the laws I'm talking about (AB68+SB9) do not permit that. Or 8-plexes for that matter.
Of course, since we're talking about getting rid of zoning here, that should be legal and we should respect people's property rights to build or live in a multi story building if they want to. It'll be fine.
Btw, I usually choose to be on the ground floor because it lets you go outside more easily, and one time it came with a dishwasher but the 2nd floor didn't.
I do say, though, that "property rights" do not guarantee absolute sovereignty. Democracy specifically exists to rob the wealthy land owners the privilege of exerting their will upon their neighbors and fellow citizens. The will of the people is regulation.
My only point was that as you increase the size and height of homes/structures in an earthquake zone it becomes more expensive due to earthquakes mitigations. You may be able to build less expensive structures in other places. Simply changing the Zoning does not necessarily automagically make the homes less expensive.
Comparing Apple to Oranges IMO:
In 2020, forest land covered about 66.2 percent of the land in Japan. While cultivated land accounted for around 11.6 percent, only just over three percent of the land was used for housing. Due to its mountainous geography, only a small part of Japan's 37.8 million hectares of land is habitable.Jun 28, 2023
My apologies, I'm actually calling your cities' planning department liars!
But buildings in Japan are all of surprisingly cheap construction, low quality (they have like no insulation), in earthquake danger zones, and safe. They're definitely not all high rises, but some of them are.
The specific building type popular in California now is called "5-over-1" and is earthquake safe. It's a 4-5 story wooden apartment sometimes with mixed use commercial at the ground floor. (The name "5-over-1", confusingly enough, refers to sections of the fire code and is not the number of floors.)
Even worse is the absolute fuckery from the fed*, which has now created a "Have and Have Not" home owner situation. Where those who are blessed have insanely valuable 3% mortgages on pre-inflation home purchases, and the Have Nots are stuck looking at high rates on heavily appreciated home values. If they can even find a home - you'd have to be forced or brain damaged to give up your juicy 3% mortgage.
So what is the solution?
There really isn't one. The government will do the same old trick of passing "feel good affordable home" legislation, that ultimately does noting, because you cannot make housing affordable without lowering the value of your voters homes.
*This is in reference to the fed being the entity that makes fixed rate mortgages possible. That cost must be borne somewhere, and it is now being carried by non-homeowners. Banks sure as shit wouldn't give out fixed low rates if they couldn't dump them on the fed's balance sheet.