My main takeaway from this is that the free market may have already lowered housing costs if bureaucracy would just get out of the way.
I mean it seems like there is something to the bit of regulation that forces them to keep rent low, but broadly this suggests to me that the bulk of spend should be on somehow making the bureaucratic part of the system run more smoothly or be easier to navigate so more projects get approved and built.
The last bit about learning from Houston especially made me chuckle. Houston is cheap and big at the same time and likely because there are so little bureaucraticisms for zoning/roofdeck requirements. The cost is that the city is ugly and not "tier 1" but seems like a fine tradeoff.
Canada is seeing housing prices skyrocket like mad because they refuse to understand this. They recently passed a federal spending bill to help fund city planners, because a huge bottleneck in housing construction is the cities requiring a city planner to check boxes on a ton of things that were never important to begin with.
City planning is one of the most destructive professions in the United States. In terms of death, lost years of life to commuting, health issues, and social ills, it has no peer. We live shorter lives, with more health issues, and are lonelier than our rich peers in other countries because of our centrally-planned built environment. We built cities the same way for thousands of years: for humans on foot; and are only now coming to realize that our great auto-centric suburban experiment was an enormous and historic blunder.
I mean it seems like there is something to the bit of regulation that forces them to keep rent low, but broadly this suggests to me that the bulk of spend should be on somehow making the bureaucratic part of the system run more smoothly or be easier to navigate so more projects get approved and built.
The last bit about learning from Houston especially made me chuckle. Houston is cheap and big at the same time and likely because there are so little bureaucraticisms for zoning/roofdeck requirements. The cost is that the city is ugly and not "tier 1" but seems like a fine tradeoff.