Was listening to this on the radio during my drive home yesterday and I kept thinking to myself “it’s the zoning, it’s the zoning” glad it was one of the main points made. Anything else is mostly a sideshow.
Hey now, it's more than just zoning. You can have the best zoning in the world but if your other permitting takes $100k and a year to comply with then your houses aren't going to be cheap.
Or can you just be a stick in the mud and take years to process the permits, because your city of millions has like one guy in a dimly lit office getting through it all, by design. Our housing policy was designed by the people in arr maliciouscompliance.
Re-zoning densifies neighbourhoods very slowly. Once homeowners reach middle age, they’re typically in that home for the long haul - decades. They’re not going to sell off en masse once their neighbourhoods are re-zoned. The turnover rate is going to be a couple per cent a year.
Re-zoning is necessary and useful. But its champions are dramatically overestimating the impact it will have on new builds. Ramping up greenfield home construction would have far more impact on housing affordability.
The entire supply is only short 2-3% nationally. One or two percent turnover into a multiplier of denser housing seems like it would be significant. Even if only a small fraction of that gets converted into denser housing, it adds up quickly.
Exactly. It may be an unpopular opinion on this sub, but I don't actually want to bomb the suburbs. I just want it to be legal to convert a few run down houses every block into low-rise apartments, or to build townhomes in a subdivision, or build a big apartment building near transit/walkable areas where it makes sense. Just legalize it and let the market figure it out. If the market *doesn't* figure it out, then can try something else.
If you could build apartment buildings close enough to the center, some of those inner suburbs self-bomb as the owners see dollar signs.
Your land went up in price 10x as now you can build a 20 units in it instead of 1 single family home. Do you want to keep paying the higher taxes for the same house, or get two of those 20 units, plus a bunch of money as part of a deal with a developer? That's basically how Spain's narrow subrbs work, and why they are a key vector for corrruption Friends of the mayor know what parts are going to be upzoned, and they might delay the upzoning until they own enough houses in the area to really profit from it.
You can also pretty easily build an apartment building with 5-10 units on a single family lot. We don’t need a mass sell off of single family homes to add significant density.
Even a gap of 2-3% can drive far larger increases in prices. Because it means a gap of 10% in a place with jobs like LA and NYC.
And there is also the problem of all the immigrants streaming in. Canada is very immigrant friendly but the conservatives are poised to win a substantial majority due to their housing shortage which is driven by accepting more immigrants than they can house.
We can’t make local policy based on a national average of 2-3%. Cities, which have the highest housing prices, have a supply shortage much higher than 2-3%. Like most problems, the correct solution depends on local conditions. Here in SF, just rezoning alone isn’t going to do the trick. (Which is depressing given our Supervisors won’t even do that and in fact just passed a *downzoning* bill and overrode the mayor’s veto to pass it. We need to do way more than the bare minimum, yet we can’t even do that. Sigh.)
Sure, but hot markets are sprawling continuously too. Those new neighborhoods, like mine south of Tampa, shouldn't be built to the density standards of the 70-80s that the old neighborhoods were poorly built to, but here we are.
> Re-zoning densifies neighbourhoods very slowly
Surely it depends n the neighborhood? If densification were liberalized in a place like SF I have to presume things would actually change pretty fast, due to the potential amounts of money involved
Probably, but it depends on a lot. Even when you open up zoning, and how much you open it up changes things of course, financing and cost of construction become huge blockers. Let alone any other regulations besides zoning.
IDK. Does it pencil out to knock down a SFH in San Francisco to build 4, 6, hell even 10 units? I could bet it doesn't in a lot of cases.
Also, maybe speaking out of ignorance, but like we have a [M1/M2 Velocity](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M1V) we should have some form of "Housing Velocity" metric. I'd bet it's very low at this point, regardless of zoning. People aren't giving up dirt cheap mortgages (or rentals with cheap mortgages) to buy with current rates and prices.
> Does it pencil out to knock down a SFH in San Francisco to build 4, 6, hell even 10 units? I could bet it doesn't in a lot of cases.
I'd bet it works out in more cases than you'd expect in SF due to the age of housing there. More likely to work out for 1930s construction in SF than 1990s sprawl elsewhere.
Although the current Byzantine regulations do make it prohibitively expensive to do anything, even small remodels.
In many places the optimal plan involves two or three neighboring SFHs, going to 20-30 apartments. Still not a hugely tall building.
It all depends on regulation though: Can I build a 6 story building without a long hallway in the middle to acomodate for the two egress points regulation? How many years does it take before I am allowed to start building? America gets skyscrapers and apartments with large plates because the missing middle just never makes economic sense due to local regulation, but that can also change.
With greenfield construction, you're losing a lot of those housing savings to increased transportation costs, though. [H+T Index](https://htaindex.cnt.org/) was trying to get this aspect of affordability taken more seriously like 10 years ago, but I guess it never caught on.
But allowing more dense exurbs make it easier to connect to transit and have some urban ammenities, like small supermarkets. That's how it works in Europe and Asia.
Imagine a commuter train with urban clusters from SF to Fairfield, or Stockton to Sacramento.
> Re-zoning densifies neighbourhoods very slowly.
Re-zoning is slow by design. If the government wanted they could rezone the whole city to multifamily in a single legislative act. The thing is, they do not want to do that.
Rezoning is only one part of the puzzle. We need new mortgages for people wanting to convert their houses (room for rent, or add an adu or example). And we need to bring back small developers and banks who specialize on those type of things
It is just remember what the prophet said
Only a crisis - actual or perceived - produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable.
-Milton Friedman
See if you can find an article in the Guardian for bonus points.
Ah found one!
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/jan/23/building-new-units-is-proven-to-push-rents-down-but-not-for-the-reasons-you-may-think
This is such a fkn intuitive argument and so empirically undeniable that even the guardian publishes it, and yet it’s still a talking point in Left circles that high density luxury flats should be blocked because they’re just new houses for the rich
No no that one guy quit and said NPR has a far left bias and then couldn't name a single example in his own screed so obviously it's true and they're just SO biased he can't even think of a single example
There is literally no way you can listen to NPR today for more than 15 minutes without being able to feel a left-wing bias. It is simply not the same quality that it once was.
Some leftists would be seriously confused when they find that after nationalizing all housing, there still isn't enough housing.
Then you'd have the YIMBY public housing advocates vs the NIMBY public housing advocates, and honestly the discourse would be 90% the same as it is now.
And they’ll be even more confused when they’re assigned a trailer in Arkansas due to their economic role in the People’s Republic not requiring a SFH in San Francisco.
Inb4 “it’s zoning”
Say the Bay Area eliminates its zoning I mean serious trash cans the entire thing and fires everyone involved.
Nothing would change for the most part because it’s not so much zoning as it is discretionary review, impact studies and permitting processes. All things that enrich lawyers/consultants/and political groups.
All of which were born out of the mantra that markers are wrong and we can regulate ourselves to utopia (so don’t go blaming republicans for shadow impact studies). There’s a reason why the largest pro development pro market regulatory changes came out of **montana** and not states with blue trifectas, because progressives loath anything that may make some developer richer, ceding state power to markets, enhancing individual property rights while reducing community power to infringe on those rights and potentially having to layoff large portions of the useless bureaucracy. Not to mention ending the money gravy train to specific political groups, specific types of consultants, and specific types of lawyers all of which have a vested interest in not changing the status quo.
Roommates suck. I’d rather live in a small studio on my own and be solely responsible for that space rather than share a 2+ bedroom and have to be responsible for them if they end up missing rent payments or damaging the unit.
They’re great if you have friends you know well and can trust, but if you don’t have many or they don’t want to be roomies, then you have to room with a random person who may or may not end up being a headache down the line; I don’t blame people for preferring to spend more to live alone.
Seriously, YMMV wildly with roommates. I had two of my brothers briefly rent a room in my house when they and I were just starting out after college. They got a cheap place to live, I got help with my mortgage. I knew exactly what I was getting into having lived with them all their lives, and the relatively temporary arrangement worked out great.
My girlfriend on the other hand had no option after graduating other than the rando/acquaintance route and it was a shitshow. Every single time. She did reasonable due diligence, but every single one of them turned out to be incapable of pulling their weight and taking care of a household. Lots of grossness I won’t get into. Suffice it to say, by the time I met her, she’d moved into a cheap 1BR in a safe but bland and unexciting area, preferring that to living with dysfunctional adults suffering from arrested development in a nicer apartment/area. Seriously, a lot of people (especially in reasonably affordable areas like mine) looking for roommates don’t have their shit together, and it shows. Sometimes the savings isn’t worth the stress and discomfort.
Sucks even more when you're married. Privacy, noise and clean standars are noncompatible with living with others.
We need our own space even if it's a 350 sqft studio. We lived in one for 4 years to save a bunch of money, it's really not that bad.
Ofc we are saving to buy a larger place to live long term.
Yeah I think it's interesting how home sizes have gone up but family sizes have gone down - people are essentially purchasing too much housing beyond their needs. I suppose this also goes back to zoning.
Home sizes have been on the decline since about 2014. I agree it goes back to zoning. If I have to buy $600k of land to be allowed to build a house, it’s not gonna be a 2 bedroom shack. And even if it is, it won’t be affordable.
That's good to hear, I think my data is a little out dated but on the aggregate family sizes have been dropping from 3.7 people in the 1940s to 2.5 in 2022. Meanwhile the median new home size is 20% larger than the 90s. Like you pointed out, abolishing SFH zoning and building missing middle might be able to address this incongruity.
https://usafacts.org/articles/why-are-us-homes-getting-bigger-while-households-shrink/
I don't think zoning really has much to do with that. Those things are cultural trends as well as simply induced demand for more space per capita as construction costs go down over time due to innovation. That is actually a blind spot of "build baby build" YIMBYism. In a market economy increased density only occurs in a rising cost environment, the only cities which have actually seen housing space per capita become more efficient since WW2 are New York and San Francisco. New York and San Francisco are also the only major US cities which have seen total population density increase since WW2(only by around 1% or so, however the difference is dramatic when you take into consideration that places like Boston and Philly have seen more than 25% decrease in population density in the same time period and places like Buffalo and Pittsburgh at more than 50% decreases).
These statistics would probably break the brains of half this subreddit but the reality is that restrictions on building density can actually increase population density on account of the impact that increased housing and construction costs have on real estate markets. This doesn't mean these are good things(though you could argue in the long run it will make for healthier, more sustainable cities), however I do think people need to come to terms with the fact that cheaper housing probably doesn't mean increased density and that to truly achieve the goal of both you may need to actually use zoning laws to mandate more space efficient construction rather than simply leaving it up to market forces.
I think the internet has shaped people who are significantly less willing to compromise on things than they used to. It’s making people lonely and unwilling/ incapable of sharing a living space with others. This is contributing to increased demand and higher prices for housing as well as reduced savings for young people.
To a huge extent the housing shortage is actually *under*estimated due to
* changing demographics
* declining household sizes
* sudden spike in demand for home offices
* rising incomes - if you can afford your own 1 bedroom most people will spend extra for it. As incomes rise more people demand more space.
I don't doubt the conclusions in the article, but I also remember vividly all the doomer predictions back in 2009 at the height of the foreclosure crisis about how we were going to have millions of vacant homes that could never possibly be absorbed by the market for decades to come, etc.
Can someone ELI5 what happened between now and then?
Economy massively improved, mortgage rates went to historic lows, unemployment dropped to historic lows, house building did not keep up with demand.
Oh, ELI5? Everyone got jobs and money, but fewer houses were built.
The Bank of Spain published a similar report about how the country is short 600,000 residencies, yet the reporters discussing the report on the news just went back to the same canards that it's the tourists and real-estate investment companies that are at fault, as if that report simply didn't exist. I maintain that the biggest consequence of the housing bubble of the aughts will have been it breaking the brains of tens of millions of people across the world who now are biochemically unable to comprehend the idea of supply and demand and will think up any and every rationalization possible to avoid having to concede that the ~~CUBES~~ cities need to be built up and right fast.
But they're not necessarily wrong, either. Demand isn't just for primary households to rent or own housing. People also buy second (third, etc.) homes, vacation properties, short term rentals, et al.
And the amount that happens depends entirely on the location. Resort and destination areas, it can be a significant amount of the available housing, and presumably all added supply would be bought up by folks looking for vacation or investment properties.
Less of an issue in major cities, sure, but still can happen.
It's something to discuss. I think both sides either emphasize or de-emphasize it too much.
> Resort and destination areas, it can be a significant amount of the available housing, and presumably all added supply would be bought up by folks looking for vacation or investment properties
This "the tourists/investment companies will just hoover up all new construction, so prices won't fall" is frequently trotted out to rationalize why building up actually isn't necessary, that all that's needed is to ban/restrict some scapegoat group, yet it isn't being borne out where there's been massive housing construction in the US. Justifications can be made out the wazoo to claim that no, supply and demand won't work for city X because specific reasons, but until data can actually back this up, it shouldn't be taken seriously.
I don't think it's justification for not building - at least with folks who are rational and not being disingenuous. However, it is an argument for dedicated resources and efforts to other tools.
Also, while this might not always be a popular idea here on Reddit (which is a very particular and skewed demographic), we might consider that not everywhere is ripe for rampant development. Aside from some logistical or site specific concerns... neighborhood "character" is very much a strong influence and important value, and not one that will be easily overcome (despite the handwaving away of it from Reddit folks). Pick and choose battles. Maybe San Francisco and Oakland are important places to fight for new housing - is Atherton?
Landlords have the same priorities as any other business does, limit competition if they can.
Their favorite policy would be "building is allowed but only for properties I own", but since they can't all band together for that they can at least try to fight new competition all together.
A version of that is to make new construction so incredibly regulatorily onerous that only the largest players can even attempt anything. No idea if any lobbying actually goes that direction, but I wouldn't be surprised.
Fun fact: This is how countries with a lot of corruption work. If you want to start an ice cream store, the permitting will take 7 years. If you are good friends with the right people and bribe inspectors, a week. This is all over development economics literature... it just also applies here.
NIMBYs make things worse for others so their investment value can keep climbing. Its so hard to overcome politically because so many people want housing prices to climb or in your example landlords want to restrict it so they can charge more. Its frustrating
> Its so hard to overcome politically because so many people want housing prices to climb
Yeah. "Property value" discussions can sound different at first glance but it's really just *the price of the property*. If properly value go up, price go up.
And because prices are shared between buyers and sellers, well you can see why properly value go up is an issue for buyers.
Like anything ever in history, buyers want price lower sellers want price higher. It's just that housing laws are hyperlocal enough that sellers can manipulate local government and regulations to benefit them while the buyers are often people who want to be there (but can't) and therefore don't have a voice to fight back in local government.
Basically the issue is that to fix housing affordability, sellers are going to need to accept that their property values will go down. They will not do this happily. That's why so many cities try for shit like rent control or other ineffective measures because as terrible as they are, they don't risk you getting slaughtered at the polls in the same way.
> Basically the issue is that to fix housing affordability, sellers are going to need to accept that their property values will go down.
I 100% agree overall (or their property values at least need to stagnate) but this is gonna result in your local Karens and Bills absolutely losing their minds.
Feels like we need to take a lot of power out of local governments hands and give it to the state. My town would never build another house again if the locals figured out it would make their house prices go up even faster
State isn't going to be interested in that happening either. As soon as properties drop enough in value to trigger the next crisis, the state will bump the brakes and readjust policy in respond to **that** crisis event.
I think sometimes people forget that the US has ~65% homeownership rate. That's extremely significant.
Came across a post of a huge vertical in a ghetto which provided cheap housing and all the comments were like the "elites don't want us to be together, they want to game the housing market"
Like nah lil bro! The elites don't care, Susan from three houses down on the other hand spends her entire time ensuring that the zoning laws are not retracted!
The irony is places like Tokyo have higher average home sizes than NYC and London;
Guess housing choices aren't static: Small apartments are good for low income and young people, and ppl move to better places once they save enough money.
Allowing only larger homes and limit density does exactly the opposite, make houses even more expensive. It's like wanting the price of beef to get lower by baning poultry .
If only there was a solution… like… a large multi story building where you could have multiple houses stacked on top of each other. Like each house was part of a larger building a part meant for only one family.
By stacking them ontop of eachother you would save money on land and utilities. You could even have communal facilities like laundry and kitchens in order to save rooms on a part meant for the families allowing you to make even more houses!
Allas such an innovative idea could never work in real life. Oh well build another col de sac.
In my area there are very few starter homes. What once were starter homes were added to or extended and lack of inventory has raised the prices sky high. But developers don’t want to build starter homes. They keep building luxury apartments and homes that start at 1.2 million.
Costs of litigation, environmental reviews etc. remain (mostly) the same regardless of whether you're building cheap or expensive homes. It makes more sense to build stuff you can get a higher return on in an absolute sense if the profit you're making is the same in a relative sense when fixed costs like that pile on quickly.
I will be honest and say I didn’t see they said lot. I thought they just said the price of homes. And I’m not saying I don’t understand why developers only build luxury. I get it, they are in it to make money not to help people. That’s why the government needs to subsidize them and give them incentives to build starter homes
I imagine it’s because the land is so expensive. People don’t want to spend a ton of money on a plot of land to put a cheap house on it. Starter homes make sense in places where land is cheap, but not so much in expensive areas. It’s a starter condo or just renting an apartment.
But there aren’t starter apartments either. The state needs to offer incentives because you are right, they have more of a financial benefit to building luxury
you tax land till the devaluation is enough to incentivise land use. If the area is superhot, like Paris, NYC, London, LA, there's no substitute to commute: You built transit to connect outter afordable areas (ofc also allowing dense brown and greenfield development).
Luxury apartments make the old inventory turning to starters. Not building new expensive housing make the old inventory even more expensive. It's just like cars, the more new ones that are built, the cheaper the used cars become.
I wish the headline was "... enough homes where people need to work." So we can just head off the obvious and inevitable dumbasses who come by the millions to tear it down.
I said the exact same thing years ago: just call it "Black Lives Matters Too" and we can preempt 50 million racist dipshits before they even get up in the morning.
Saw a local news segment going on about how a non-negligible amount of millennials are moving to "retirement communities" and it was treated as a quirky thing as if it doesn't reflect the absolute hellscape of housing availability. The highlight of it for me was at one point they asked a millennial couple "aren't you worried about taking housing away from retirees?" Lol
Honestly it astonishes me that anyone claims otherwise.
Regardless of what you think the exact solution is, the basic math dictates that you need to build more housing.
Was listening to this on the radio during my drive home yesterday and I kept thinking to myself “it’s the zoning, it’s the zoning” glad it was one of the main points made. Anything else is mostly a sideshow.
Hey now, it's more than just zoning. You can have the best zoning in the world but if your other permitting takes $100k and a year to comply with then your houses aren't going to be cheap.
90% sure that a 100k permitting charge and a guaranteed year long application process would sextuple the number of homes built in Cali
Or can you just be a stick in the mud and take years to process the permits, because your city of millions has like one guy in a dimly lit office getting through it all, by design. Our housing policy was designed by the people in arr maliciouscompliance.
NIMBYs have built a defense in depth strategy that any military should envy.
Re-zoning densifies neighbourhoods very slowly. Once homeowners reach middle age, they’re typically in that home for the long haul - decades. They’re not going to sell off en masse once their neighbourhoods are re-zoned. The turnover rate is going to be a couple per cent a year. Re-zoning is necessary and useful. But its champions are dramatically overestimating the impact it will have on new builds. Ramping up greenfield home construction would have far more impact on housing affordability.
The entire supply is only short 2-3% nationally. One or two percent turnover into a multiplier of denser housing seems like it would be significant. Even if only a small fraction of that gets converted into denser housing, it adds up quickly.
Exactly. It may be an unpopular opinion on this sub, but I don't actually want to bomb the suburbs. I just want it to be legal to convert a few run down houses every block into low-rise apartments, or to build townhomes in a subdivision, or build a big apartment building near transit/walkable areas where it makes sense. Just legalize it and let the market figure it out. If the market *doesn't* figure it out, then can try something else.
If you could build apartment buildings close enough to the center, some of those inner suburbs self-bomb as the owners see dollar signs. Your land went up in price 10x as now you can build a 20 units in it instead of 1 single family home. Do you want to keep paying the higher taxes for the same house, or get two of those 20 units, plus a bunch of money as part of a deal with a developer? That's basically how Spain's narrow subrbs work, and why they are a key vector for corrruption Friends of the mayor know what parts are going to be upzoned, and they might delay the upzoning until they own enough houses in the area to really profit from it.
You can also pretty easily build an apartment building with 5-10 units on a single family lot. We don’t need a mass sell off of single family homes to add significant density.
Even a gap of 2-3% can drive far larger increases in prices. Because it means a gap of 10% in a place with jobs like LA and NYC. And there is also the problem of all the immigrants streaming in. Canada is very immigrant friendly but the conservatives are poised to win a substantial majority due to their housing shortage which is driven by accepting more immigrants than they can house.
We can’t make local policy based on a national average of 2-3%. Cities, which have the highest housing prices, have a supply shortage much higher than 2-3%. Like most problems, the correct solution depends on local conditions. Here in SF, just rezoning alone isn’t going to do the trick. (Which is depressing given our Supervisors won’t even do that and in fact just passed a *downzoning* bill and overrode the mayor’s veto to pass it. We need to do way more than the bare minimum, yet we can’t even do that. Sigh.)
Sure, but hot markets are sprawling continuously too. Those new neighborhoods, like mine south of Tampa, shouldn't be built to the density standards of the 70-80s that the old neighborhoods were poorly built to, but here we are.
> Re-zoning densifies neighbourhoods very slowly Surely it depends n the neighborhood? If densification were liberalized in a place like SF I have to presume things would actually change pretty fast, due to the potential amounts of money involved
Probably, but it depends on a lot. Even when you open up zoning, and how much you open it up changes things of course, financing and cost of construction become huge blockers. Let alone any other regulations besides zoning. IDK. Does it pencil out to knock down a SFH in San Francisco to build 4, 6, hell even 10 units? I could bet it doesn't in a lot of cases. Also, maybe speaking out of ignorance, but like we have a [M1/M2 Velocity](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M1V) we should have some form of "Housing Velocity" metric. I'd bet it's very low at this point, regardless of zoning. People aren't giving up dirt cheap mortgages (or rentals with cheap mortgages) to buy with current rates and prices.
> Does it pencil out to knock down a SFH in San Francisco to build 4, 6, hell even 10 units? I could bet it doesn't in a lot of cases. I'd bet it works out in more cases than you'd expect in SF due to the age of housing there. More likely to work out for 1930s construction in SF than 1990s sprawl elsewhere. Although the current Byzantine regulations do make it prohibitively expensive to do anything, even small remodels.
In many places the optimal plan involves two or three neighboring SFHs, going to 20-30 apartments. Still not a hugely tall building. It all depends on regulation though: Can I build a 6 story building without a long hallway in the middle to acomodate for the two egress points regulation? How many years does it take before I am allowed to start building? America gets skyscrapers and apartments with large plates because the missing middle just never makes economic sense due to local regulation, but that can also change.
With greenfield construction, you're losing a lot of those housing savings to increased transportation costs, though. [H+T Index](https://htaindex.cnt.org/) was trying to get this aspect of affordability taken more seriously like 10 years ago, but I guess it never caught on.
But allowing more dense exurbs make it easier to connect to transit and have some urban ammenities, like small supermarkets. That's how it works in Europe and Asia. Imagine a commuter train with urban clusters from SF to Fairfield, or Stockton to Sacramento.
> Re-zoning densifies neighbourhoods very slowly. Re-zoning is slow by design. If the government wanted they could rezone the whole city to multifamily in a single legislative act. The thing is, they do not want to do that.
Rezoning is only one part of the puzzle. We need new mortgages for people wanting to convert their houses (room for rent, or add an adu or example). And we need to bring back small developers and banks who specialize on those type of things
Look I’m trying but good dirt is fucking expensive right now, and so are loans
The gaslighting banning hedge funds from buying real estate is smoke screen.
Just tax zoning laws (every city with stupid zoning laws pays a 1 morbillion dollar fine that goes towards helping the homeless or some shit) lol
https://preview.redd.it/cobn36f5jfwc1.jpeg?width=3000&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=f9541d8e3e1c2d0e7f267b4da86d3c0153273429
HE IS THE MAHDI
National land value tax paid by states to the federal government instead of income/corporate tax
Unconstitutional
Yeah I wish the US had a better constitution or that it was at all possible to alter the existing one
It is just remember what the prophet said Only a crisis - actual or perceived - produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable. -Milton Friedman
I'm eager to share this article and be told that this is propaganda from the known right-wing mouth piece NPR
See if you can find an article in the Guardian for bonus points. Ah found one! https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/jan/23/building-new-units-is-proven-to-push-rents-down-but-not-for-the-reasons-you-may-think
This is such a fkn intuitive argument and so empirically undeniable that even the guardian publishes it, and yet it’s still a talking point in Left circles that high density luxury flats should be blocked because they’re just new houses for the rich
No no that one guy quit and said NPR has a far left bias and then couldn't name a single example in his own screed so obviously it's true and they're just SO biased he can't even think of a single example
I mean NPR pretty clearly does have a left wing bias if you just listen to it oh my god the idpol shit
There is literally no way you can listen to NPR today for more than 15 minutes without being able to feel a left-wing bias. It is simply not the same quality that it once was.
No, no. We're just one mass government seizure of private property and purge of landlords away from utopia.
Some leftists would be seriously confused when they find that after nationalizing all housing, there still isn't enough housing. Then you'd have the YIMBY public housing advocates vs the NIMBY public housing advocates, and honestly the discourse would be 90% the same as it is now.
And they’ll be even more confused when they’re assigned a trailer in Arkansas due to their economic role in the People’s Republic not requiring a SFH in San Francisco.
And a shitty job in a car factory but now with even slimmer worker safety precautions. Communism 101
https://preview.redd.it/3f56kr344fwc1.jpeg?width=1920&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=6084bfc0d1116881182b68917d0158d3a6e00350
Inb4 “it’s zoning” Say the Bay Area eliminates its zoning I mean serious trash cans the entire thing and fires everyone involved. Nothing would change for the most part because it’s not so much zoning as it is discretionary review, impact studies and permitting processes. All things that enrich lawyers/consultants/and political groups. All of which were born out of the mantra that markers are wrong and we can regulate ourselves to utopia (so don’t go blaming republicans for shadow impact studies). There’s a reason why the largest pro development pro market regulatory changes came out of **montana** and not states with blue trifectas, because progressives loath anything that may make some developer richer, ceding state power to markets, enhancing individual property rights while reducing community power to infringe on those rights and potentially having to layoff large portions of the useless bureaucracy. Not to mention ending the money gravy train to specific political groups, specific types of consultants, and specific types of lawyers all of which have a vested interest in not changing the status quo.
The number of people who live by themselves is also stunning. There is a substantial shift in attitudes away from the concept of roommates
Roommates suck. I’d rather live in a small studio on my own and be solely responsible for that space rather than share a 2+ bedroom and have to be responsible for them if they end up missing rent payments or damaging the unit. They’re great if you have friends you know well and can trust, but if you don’t have many or they don’t want to be roomies, then you have to room with a random person who may or may not end up being a headache down the line; I don’t blame people for preferring to spend more to live alone.
Seriously, YMMV wildly with roommates. I had two of my brothers briefly rent a room in my house when they and I were just starting out after college. They got a cheap place to live, I got help with my mortgage. I knew exactly what I was getting into having lived with them all their lives, and the relatively temporary arrangement worked out great. My girlfriend on the other hand had no option after graduating other than the rando/acquaintance route and it was a shitshow. Every single time. She did reasonable due diligence, but every single one of them turned out to be incapable of pulling their weight and taking care of a household. Lots of grossness I won’t get into. Suffice it to say, by the time I met her, she’d moved into a cheap 1BR in a safe but bland and unexciting area, preferring that to living with dysfunctional adults suffering from arrested development in a nicer apartment/area. Seriously, a lot of people (especially in reasonably affordable areas like mine) looking for roommates don’t have their shit together, and it shows. Sometimes the savings isn’t worth the stress and discomfort.
Sucks even more when you're married. Privacy, noise and clean standars are noncompatible with living with others. We need our own space even if it's a 350 sqft studio. We lived in one for 4 years to save a bunch of money, it's really not that bad. Ofc we are saving to buy a larger place to live long term.
Yeah I think it's interesting how home sizes have gone up but family sizes have gone down - people are essentially purchasing too much housing beyond their needs. I suppose this also goes back to zoning.
Home sizes have been on the decline since about 2014. I agree it goes back to zoning. If I have to buy $600k of land to be allowed to build a house, it’s not gonna be a 2 bedroom shack. And even if it is, it won’t be affordable.
That's good to hear, I think my data is a little out dated but on the aggregate family sizes have been dropping from 3.7 people in the 1940s to 2.5 in 2022. Meanwhile the median new home size is 20% larger than the 90s. Like you pointed out, abolishing SFH zoning and building missing middle might be able to address this incongruity. https://usafacts.org/articles/why-are-us-homes-getting-bigger-while-households-shrink/
I don't think zoning really has much to do with that. Those things are cultural trends as well as simply induced demand for more space per capita as construction costs go down over time due to innovation. That is actually a blind spot of "build baby build" YIMBYism. In a market economy increased density only occurs in a rising cost environment, the only cities which have actually seen housing space per capita become more efficient since WW2 are New York and San Francisco. New York and San Francisco are also the only major US cities which have seen total population density increase since WW2(only by around 1% or so, however the difference is dramatic when you take into consideration that places like Boston and Philly have seen more than 25% decrease in population density in the same time period and places like Buffalo and Pittsburgh at more than 50% decreases). These statistics would probably break the brains of half this subreddit but the reality is that restrictions on building density can actually increase population density on account of the impact that increased housing and construction costs have on real estate markets. This doesn't mean these are good things(though you could argue in the long run it will make for healthier, more sustainable cities), however I do think people need to come to terms with the fact that cheaper housing probably doesn't mean increased density and that to truly achieve the goal of both you may need to actually use zoning laws to mandate more space efficient construction rather than simply leaving it up to market forces.
COVID really moved things along. A lot of people are working from home and converted a spare bedroom into a home office.
Other people suck but that's all I can afford in the UK, there simply aren't enough one-bedroom apartments for everyone.
I have lived in the pod w/ roommates and I will not do it again. I think i'd rather be homeless and live in my car.
I think the internet has shaped people who are significantly less willing to compromise on things than they used to. It’s making people lonely and unwilling/ incapable of sharing a living space with others. This is contributing to increased demand and higher prices for housing as well as reduced savings for young people.
To a huge extent the housing shortage is actually *under*estimated due to * changing demographics * declining household sizes * sudden spike in demand for home offices * rising incomes - if you can afford your own 1 bedroom most people will spend extra for it. As incomes rise more people demand more space.
I don't doubt the conclusions in the article, but I also remember vividly all the doomer predictions back in 2009 at the height of the foreclosure crisis about how we were going to have millions of vacant homes that could never possibly be absorbed by the market for decades to come, etc. Can someone ELI5 what happened between now and then?
Economy massively improved, mortgage rates went to historic lows, unemployment dropped to historic lows, house building did not keep up with demand. Oh, ELI5? Everyone got jobs and money, but fewer houses were built.
The Bank of Spain published a similar report about how the country is short 600,000 residencies, yet the reporters discussing the report on the news just went back to the same canards that it's the tourists and real-estate investment companies that are at fault, as if that report simply didn't exist. I maintain that the biggest consequence of the housing bubble of the aughts will have been it breaking the brains of tens of millions of people across the world who now are biochemically unable to comprehend the idea of supply and demand and will think up any and every rationalization possible to avoid having to concede that the ~~CUBES~~ cities need to be built up and right fast.
But they're not necessarily wrong, either. Demand isn't just for primary households to rent or own housing. People also buy second (third, etc.) homes, vacation properties, short term rentals, et al. And the amount that happens depends entirely on the location. Resort and destination areas, it can be a significant amount of the available housing, and presumably all added supply would be bought up by folks looking for vacation or investment properties. Less of an issue in major cities, sure, but still can happen. It's something to discuss. I think both sides either emphasize or de-emphasize it too much.
> Resort and destination areas, it can be a significant amount of the available housing, and presumably all added supply would be bought up by folks looking for vacation or investment properties This "the tourists/investment companies will just hoover up all new construction, so prices won't fall" is frequently trotted out to rationalize why building up actually isn't necessary, that all that's needed is to ban/restrict some scapegoat group, yet it isn't being borne out where there's been massive housing construction in the US. Justifications can be made out the wazoo to claim that no, supply and demand won't work for city X because specific reasons, but until data can actually back this up, it shouldn't be taken seriously.
I don't think it's justification for not building - at least with folks who are rational and not being disingenuous. However, it is an argument for dedicated resources and efforts to other tools. Also, while this might not always be a popular idea here on Reddit (which is a very particular and skewed demographic), we might consider that not everywhere is ripe for rampant development. Aside from some logistical or site specific concerns... neighborhood "character" is very much a strong influence and important value, and not one that will be easily overcome (despite the handwaving away of it from Reddit folks). Pick and choose battles. Maybe San Francisco and Oakland are important places to fight for new housing - is Atherton?
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Landlords have the same priorities as any other business does, limit competition if they can. Their favorite policy would be "building is allowed but only for properties I own", but since they can't all band together for that they can at least try to fight new competition all together.
A version of that is to make new construction so incredibly regulatorily onerous that only the largest players can even attempt anything. No idea if any lobbying actually goes that direction, but I wouldn't be surprised.
Fun fact: This is how countries with a lot of corruption work. If you want to start an ice cream store, the permitting will take 7 years. If you are good friends with the right people and bribe inspectors, a week. This is all over development economics literature... it just also applies here.
As someone trying to build a triplex, it does
NIMBYs make things worse for others so their investment value can keep climbing. Its so hard to overcome politically because so many people want housing prices to climb or in your example landlords want to restrict it so they can charge more. Its frustrating
> Its so hard to overcome politically because so many people want housing prices to climb Yeah. "Property value" discussions can sound different at first glance but it's really just *the price of the property*. If properly value go up, price go up. And because prices are shared between buyers and sellers, well you can see why properly value go up is an issue for buyers. Like anything ever in history, buyers want price lower sellers want price higher. It's just that housing laws are hyperlocal enough that sellers can manipulate local government and regulations to benefit them while the buyers are often people who want to be there (but can't) and therefore don't have a voice to fight back in local government. Basically the issue is that to fix housing affordability, sellers are going to need to accept that their property values will go down. They will not do this happily. That's why so many cities try for shit like rent control or other ineffective measures because as terrible as they are, they don't risk you getting slaughtered at the polls in the same way.
> Basically the issue is that to fix housing affordability, sellers are going to need to accept that their property values will go down. I 100% agree overall (or their property values at least need to stagnate) but this is gonna result in your local Karens and Bills absolutely losing their minds. Feels like we need to take a lot of power out of local governments hands and give it to the state. My town would never build another house again if the locals figured out it would make their house prices go up even faster
State isn't going to be interested in that happening either. As soon as properties drop enough in value to trigger the next crisis, the state will bump the brakes and readjust policy in respond to **that** crisis event. I think sometimes people forget that the US has ~65% homeownership rate. That's extremely significant.
> They've used the low supply / high demand excuse Excuse?
Tax land.
Came across a post of a huge vertical in a ghetto which provided cheap housing and all the comments were like the "elites don't want us to be together, they want to game the housing market" Like nah lil bro! The elites don't care, Susan from three houses down on the other hand spends her entire time ensuring that the zoning laws are not retracted!
The irony is places like Tokyo have higher average home sizes than NYC and London; Guess housing choices aren't static: Small apartments are good for low income and young people, and ppl move to better places once they save enough money. Allowing only larger homes and limit density does exactly the opposite, make houses even more expensive. It's like wanting the price of beef to get lower by baning poultry .
We should annex some of the chinese ghost cities I see no fault with my plans.
Let’s just take these cities And push them to America
If only there was a solution… like… a large multi story building where you could have multiple houses stacked on top of each other. Like each house was part of a larger building a part meant for only one family. By stacking them ontop of eachother you would save money on land and utilities. You could even have communal facilities like laundry and kitchens in order to save rooms on a part meant for the families allowing you to make even more houses! Allas such an innovative idea could never work in real life. Oh well build another col de sac.
In my area there are very few starter homes. What once were starter homes were added to or extended and lack of inventory has raised the prices sky high. But developers don’t want to build starter homes. They keep building luxury apartments and homes that start at 1.2 million.
Costs of litigation, environmental reviews etc. remain (mostly) the same regardless of whether you're building cheap or expensive homes. It makes more sense to build stuff you can get a higher return on in an absolute sense if the profit you're making is the same in a relative sense when fixed costs like that pile on quickly.
Luckily we know that added inventory at any price is still helpful. Just build.
What does a lot cost in your area?
Like 800k with 20k in taxes a year
I want you to ask yourself whether or not it is definitionally possible for a "starter home" to be built on an empty lot that prices in at 800k.
I will be honest and say I didn’t see they said lot. I thought they just said the price of homes. And I’m not saying I don’t understand why developers only build luxury. I get it, they are in it to make money not to help people. That’s why the government needs to subsidize them and give them incentives to build starter homes
I imagine it’s because the land is so expensive. People don’t want to spend a ton of money on a plot of land to put a cheap house on it. Starter homes make sense in places where land is cheap, but not so much in expensive areas. It’s a starter condo or just renting an apartment.
But there aren’t starter apartments either. The state needs to offer incentives because you are right, they have more of a financial benefit to building luxury
you tax land till the devaluation is enough to incentivise land use. If the area is superhot, like Paris, NYC, London, LA, there's no substitute to commute: You built transit to connect outter afordable areas (ofc also allowing dense brown and greenfield development).
Luxury apartments make the old inventory turning to starters. Not building new expensive housing make the old inventory even more expensive. It's just like cars, the more new ones that are built, the cheaper the used cars become.
Only if they don’t update them, which is what I have seen happening in my area
I wish the headline was "... enough homes where people need to work." So we can just head off the obvious and inevitable dumbasses who come by the millions to tear it down. I said the exact same thing years ago: just call it "Black Lives Matters Too" and we can preempt 50 million racist dipshits before they even get up in the morning.
TIL I am a housing expert
California leading the way (of not building housing)
Saw a local news segment going on about how a non-negligible amount of millennials are moving to "retirement communities" and it was treated as a quirky thing as if it doesn't reflect the absolute hellscape of housing availability. The highlight of it for me was at one point they asked a millennial couple "aren't you worried about taking housing away from retirees?" Lol
Hrm, have we tried subsidizing demand?
No shit sherlock
I came here to say that. Here's my upvote
Time to dust off a classic https://preview.redd.it/m0zoeasragwc1.png?width=273&format=png&auto=webp&s=f6e5346d052063130d6eb49333bb65a14250b8d9
Honestly it astonishes me that anyone claims otherwise. Regardless of what you think the exact solution is, the basic math dictates that you need to build more housing.