Land use regulation doesn't preclude high home prices, it precludes low home prices. Excluding people who can only buy or rent a low priced house is an exclusive policy. Balancing that exclusive policy with a little bit of inclusive policy in form of a government/"low income" apartment does not make the overall housing policy inclusive.
This is a classic political maneuver. Build two units out of a thousand with regulated prices, then declare victory because you can point to one person paying an affordable price, even though it's being sold below market at restricted volumes and isn't available to everyone.
If the same units were available at that price but in unrestricted quantity to every member of the public, the high prices of competing housing would fall.
> a shortage of new construction, a lack of tenant protection
"Tenant protection" -- especially rent control -- is a nontrivial cause of the shortage of new construction. High rents are a signal to developers that there is money to be made constructing new housing. If it's not possible to make the money, they won't do the construction, which is what rent control causes.
You get a population of existing residents with rent controlled apartments, who then have no incentive to fix the housing shortage or eliminate rent control, but insufficient construction going on and consequently even higher prices for people who didn't get a rent controlled apartment in 1975.
(Restrictive zoning is another, independent cause of the same problem, and the two compound each other.)
I’m not saying you’re wrong, but saying there’s no benefit to building new housing because there’s not a fortune to be made, well that just seems like capitalist-apologizing.
We’ve built a system where humans are expected to somehow accrue interest at the whim of the capitalist overlord. The soul of rent control is pretty important, so maybe rent control needs to evolve?
I’m hard pressed to defend it completely because it seems like dancing around the fundamental problem of capitalism not being in alignment with the best interests of society.
> I’m not saying you’re wrong, but saying there’s no benefit to building new housing because there’s not a fortune to be made, well that just seems like capitalist-apologizing.
It's just math. The land costs a million dollars, the construction costs $500K, therefore the net present value of the future rents (less property taxes, insurance, etc.) has to be $1.5M, or the construction does not occur. Rent control puts the marginal construction project below the break-even point.
> We’ve built a system where humans are expected to somehow accrue interest at the whim of the capitalist overlord. The soul of rent control is pretty important, so maybe rent control needs to evolve?
The soul of rent control is bad math. If you want lower rents, adopt policies that encourage housing construction until rents are suitably low. At which point, who needs rent control?
"Rent control" is the idea that people already living in a city have more rights to live there than people who are not.
While it may sound socially just it is also one of most un-progressive (conservative) things you can imagine. It literally conserves the population of a given district.
And market rents are the idea that people with more money then you have the right to live in your apartment then you do.
Neither is fair, but both are unfair in different ways. Your preference for market distribution, as opposed to lottery distribution (which is what rent control essentially is) is largely an ideological one.
The notable difference is that the market distribution causes greater incentives for construction in high demand areas, so it doesn't just affect who gets the apartments, it affects how many apartments there are to get.
And only one of them makes it possible for both you and the person with more money than you to have an apartment.
Yes, it is an ideological preference. Rent control is conservative, market distribution is liberal. I just point that people really really want to be called progressive without being one.
You can't be progressive and conservative at the same time! You can barely be progressive if you hold conservative view on one of the most important issues. You can only be centrist that way.
The phrase “your apartment” strikes me as the heart of the issue. If you’re renting then it’s not really yours. It’s the landlord’s, and they just let you use it temporarily.
And yet that is the phrase we use, because people do feel a sense of ownership about their living space even when legally they have no ownership. A lot of these policies come down to how much we want to back that feeling up with legal rights.
> Your preference for market distribution, as opposed to lottery distribution (which is what rent control essentially is) is largely an ideological one.
Can't speak for him, but if you believe a free market has the same housing results are as a centrally planned market, well, damn.
>While it may sound socially just it is also one of most un-progressive (conservative) things you can imagine. It literally conserves the population of a given district.
Well, who said conservative is bad?
It's about the interests of this or that group (e.g. given population vs people coming from outside). Arguments can be made for either, but if a given population is not protected, then those coming from outside wont be protected (from people coming from outside later on) either.
People build cities to be protected and prosper long time in them, not to give opportunities to third parties to come and displace them from the places they've built and helped grow.
> It's about the interests of this or that group (e.g. given population vs people coming from outside). Arguments can be made for either, but if a given population is not protected, then those coming from outside wont be protected (from people coming from outside later on) either.
> People build cities to be protected and prosper long time in them, not to give opportunities to third parties to come and displace them from the places they've built and helped grow.
Well you're basically repeating Donald Trump's words when he explains why he wants to build a wall, and last time I have checked nobody calls him progressive.
Why aren't there developers that are willing to make 17% margins instead of 20% margins? You know what I'm saying. Related Group has always been happy to and does to this day build luxury units that get scooped up by elite Venezuelans and Russians. Who will build non-luxury units? The owners will claim they're luxury for the next 40 years, so there's no real trickle down effect.
> Why aren't there developers that are willing to make 17% margins instead of 20% margins?
Because the margins in a different city are 19%, or some entirely different class of investment now has better risk-adjusted returns so the funding falls through.
Don't developers usually only operate in specific regions where they have experience and contacts and have established relations with suppliers and contractors?
Can they easily enough move between cities that they could leave a 17% city to chase 19% margins?
There are lots of developers who are happy to build at low margins. In fact a lot of developers make their money by charging a flat fee for managing the project and don't take any upside at all. Plus there are plenty of non-profit developers out there.
The problem is that there are fixed costs associated with building a unit of housing - city approval fees, construction costs, land - which are more or less independent of what kind of housing you're building and how 'luxury' it is. So there is a floor on the cost of housing in any given location. Then you have to factor in lenders and their requirements - how much interest they'll charge and what % of the project cost they'll lend you. Since lenders almost never will lend 100% of the project cost you need equity investors too, and they generally have expected project returns. Of course you can find non-profit entities at all these layers who will help you refuce costs it's hard to out together a project in a major city that is anything less than expensive these days.
This is not how rent control works in any city in the US that I know of. Everywhere I know of rent control only applies to significantly older buildings. Which means that new buildings can charge much higher prices, which means that rent control actually encourages new buildings.
The only time some type of rent control applies for new buildings is when they are specifically built as "affordable housing". This usually happens when a developer is required to build affordable housing to pay back for some favor he/she received from the city.
> Everywhere I know of rent control only applies to significantly older buildings. Which means that new buildings can charge much higher prices, which means that rent control actually encourages new buildings.
New buildings are what become older buildings. If that causes them to become less valuable, they become less valuable immediately because the future loss gets priced in, making them less valuable to construct.
And older buildings also become newer buildings. In most places with a housing shortage there is already a structure on any given piece of appropriately zoned land. To get more housing, you have to knock something down and replace it with something bigger, or subdivide an existing building with fewer, larger apartments into one with more, smaller ones etc. That can't happen if the building is full of existing rent controlled tenants who can't be removed (and have strong incentives to never leave).
In all the major cities I know of (and this includes san francisco and los angeles), if there is rent control it is set for buildings older than a fixed date (usually somewhere about 1979). So no, newer buildings will not become covered by rent control unless the laws are drastically changed.
Furthermore, in California the Ellis act allows landlords to mass evict rent controlled tenants in order to demolish a building for new construction, so your second point is not valid either.
> Furthermore, in California the Ellis act allows landlords to mass evict rent controlled tenants in order to demolish a building for new construction, so your second point is not valid either.
That would still apparently prevent the building from being subdivided into smaller units or otherwise reconfigured/improved for higher density.
And your point seems to be not that rent control isn't a problem but rather that some places are already phasing it out -- which is good, but presents no aid to the people who continue to propose expanding it or retaining it in the areas it isn't already on its way out.
> Everywhere I know of rent control only applies to significantly older buildings. Which means that new buildings can charge much higher prices, which means that rent control actually encourages new buildings.
How do you replace old buildings with new buildings in this process?
> "Tenant protection" -- especially rent control -- is a nontrivial cause of the shortage of new construction.
Sure, tenant protection is, but “especially rent control” is wrong: that's just a tenant protection that conservatives/libertarians tend to think is vulnerable to argument. Minimum habitability standards do more to create a lack of affordable housing, but winkingt the argument that that isn't a necessary cost is perceived to be harder, even by the folks who'd really prefer the complete absence of regulation.
> Sure, tenant protection is, but “especially rent control” is wrong
It depends how you're measuring. If you mean by "amount of net cost / lost income to property owners" then sure, it's not especially anything because it's exactly anything to the degree that it does that.
But if you measure in terms of value for money, rent control sucks. Requiring landlords to have functioning clean water costs them money, but it also makes them money -- tenants are willing to pay more for an apartment that isn't falling apart. Some things may cost more than they benefit the landlord in making the apartment more valuable, but at least they may come closer to break-even, and the cost in incentive is only the difference between the two. Rent control is pure dead weight loss.
Of course, this is also the argument for why most of the other regulations aren't needed, because anything above break-even would get done anyway -- you don't need a law requiring someone to improve their building in a way that results in a net profit. The apartments that become unmaintained slums are the rent controlled ones, because the rent is sufficiently below market that the tenants would suffer the flaws rather than moving out.
I think you're wrong. In Prague, they started removing rent controls several years ago, and we have seen highest increase in property values in maybe three decades.
Also, if I owned some property, I am not sure I would want to invest in building new one and have to decrease rent rather than enjoy the fact that the rent is high.
All in all, I suspect that rent control might be quite insignificant factor in housing scarcity. More important is probably lack of actual housing construction financed by government.
> Economists are virtually unanimous in concluding that rent controls are destructive. In a 1990 poll of 464 economists published in the May 1992 issue of the American Economic Review, 93 percent of U.S. respondents agreed, either completely or with provisos, that “a ceiling on rents reduces the quantity and quality of housing available.”
Your gut instinct, like most on this issue, is incorrect. When removing rent control, it is going to take time for things to finally settle to the real prices as well as actual development to get started, but its certainly good for the long run to do away with it.
The reason this subject is tough is because quantity and quality do not necessarily lead to affordability for the same population as rent control. Laissez Faire economics always works for the faceless theoretical self interested actor but how are rising prices and new builds going to help to someone from being priced out? It can't. If it did, the control would be benign anyway.
> quantity and quality do not necessarily lead to affordability for the same population as re t control.
Rent control is not need-based. People across the wealth spectrum enjoy the personal benefits of rent control (in SF there is no shortage of housholds bringing home several hundred thousand dollars a year who pay way below market rents on their rent-controlled apartments).
The problem with getting rid of it is that the benefits of more housing supply relative to demand would probably take decades to come to fruition. But the pain of suddenly losing rent control (for the percentage of people who actually do need it) is felt immediately. Who cares if your city will have lots of cheap housing in a decade if you can't pay rent next month?
This is all conjecture from your gut. We are watching what rent control does to a city like SF in real time -- it is a disaster. The only way out of it is to ramp up supply. To whatever degree Tokyo has priced anyone out, it is significantly less than the likes of most US cities because it does not purposefully retard investment with zoning and rent control.
"People across the wealth spectrum" do NOT enjoy rent control. It gets gamed and abused. The bulk of SF is rent controlled, resulting in more and more people cramming into places that don't get maintained and they're not able to move out of when situations like their job changes. This is a disaster, nobody can move to be closer to work. Only a tiny amount of market rate housing is available for new residents which is disproportionately high because the rest of the market is severely under-priced.
You will never stop everyone from getting priced out. That is just the nature of things, but you can save a lot more people that pain than we do now due to foolish policies like rent control and awful zoning.
> In Prague, they started removing rent controls several years ago, and we have seen highest increase in property values in maybe three decades.
Property values are not the same as rents or general housing costs. As soon as you make construction more profitable, it makes the land worth more -- property values go up. But then the construction happens and housing costs, i.e. price per unit, go down as a result of more units.
Before you had two housing units on $500K in land going for $1000/month. After the land is worth $2M but it has 20 housing units going for $750 -- and the landlord is making more revenue, because 20x$750 is more than 2x$1000, enough to offset the higher property cost.
> Also, if I owned some property, I am not sure I would want to invest in building new one and have to decrease rent rather than enjoy the fact that the rent is high.
Rent doesn't materially decrease as a result of one person building one building, it's a result of many new buildings across the city. So your choice isn't between the existing two units at $1000 and twenty new ones at $750 (though even that itself is still profitable), because if you do nothing the existing units will still fall to $750 each as a result of what other people do once they're allowed to do it.
> More important is probably lack of actual housing construction financed by government.
Actual construction subsidies might help when you have a massive shortage and you want it correct it quickly, but in general it isn't necessary -- when rents are high and construction is permitted, it happens.
> In Prague, they started removing rent controls several years ago, and we have seen highest increase in property values in maybe three decades.
Cant speak for prague, but if you remove rent-controls, rent is going to go up, simlpy because suppressed rent values will go up.
If volume remained the same, you would expect to see a decrease in some properties and a high increase in the de-regulated ones.
Bear in mind that there is also elasticity: if more properties go on the market and prices go down, you could see a higher volume of people coming in. That's a much better metric of success than price.
>You get a population of existing residents with rent controlled apartments, who then have no incentive to fix the housing shortage or eliminate rent control, but insufficient construction going on and consequently even higher prices for people who didn't get a rent controlled apartment in 1975.
You may not be in that population but you have to solve for them as well. Removing rent control is only going to price them out.
> You may not be in that population but you have to solve for them as well. Removing rent control is only going to price them out.
There is a suitable way to phase this out. First, never create another new rent controlled apartment -- they only exist as preexisting, can't be transferred to anyone but a spouse, and can't be transferred more than once. Second, allow the landlord the option to provide a comparable replacement apartment in a different building at the same rent, so that buildings with existing rent controlled apartments can be replaced with higher density ones.
Then in general adopt long-term policies to keep market-rate housing prices under control, so that they don't rise faster than inflation and future generations have no need for a ridiculous price control because the market price becomes and remains affordable.
> You may not be in that population but you have to solve for them as well. Removing rent control is only going to price them out.
A recipient of rent control has had enormous subsidies and economic appreciation, and even then it is not enough, you need to give them more.
There are multiple ways to bust this open. The first one is allowing rent controllees to sublet. If you want to maintain their status, at least let them profit by housing more people, making themselves richer and lowering rents for the whole market.
Cities are full. US population has doubled since 1960. If we get rid of zoning we will end up with overpopulated cities like Hong-Kong, Jakarta, Moscow, Tokyo.
That is not a problem of population density, that problem is inadequate peak capacity in transportation infrastructure. For example if you stack subway lines one under the other simalar to those described by Elon Musk, or increase the capacity of the existing public transport system through through faster & more frequent trains, you can resolve such issues. You just need to commit to spending on the infrastructure to support the population density.
Interestingly, it is policies like prop 13 in California that restrict the revenue needed to invest in the infrastructure to support higher population densities.
I've been to Tokyo several times and always use public transit, even during rush hour and it honestly has never been worse than the light rail in SF. It gets crowded at times sure and I'm sure there are specific times on some lines when it's this bad that you get staff posing passengers in, however it's far away from being the norm. It's usually pleasant and if take it over my commute on a car any day.
No they are not, look at the varience in population density of us cities [0] and it's pretty obvious lots of them can expand. The real problem is that jobs are highly local and people want to live in an area where their are lots of job opportunities. Thus, cities with lots of good job opportunities beget more job opportunities like how Amazon chose New York instead of a smaller city.
When you build more appartments, more people come to the city. It’s a positive feedback loop. The result is a city with terrible quality of life. The city no one wants to live in. Only then it will stop growing.
Yeah, like Tokyo. It's still one of the most amazing places on the planet, with great culture, ready to get around and even beautiful green spaces. But soon it will continue to grow and become awful...<\s>
> Here is a startling fact: in 2014 there were 142,417 housing starts in the city of Tokyo (population 13.3m, no empty land), more than the 83,657 housing permits issued in the state of California (population 38.7m), or the 137,010 houses started in the entire country of England (population 54.3m).
> Tokyo’s steady construction is linked to a still more startling fact. In contrast to the enormous house price booms that have distorted western cities — setting young against old, redistributing wealth to the already wealthy, and denying others the chance to move to where the good jobs are — the cost of property in Japan’s capital has hardly budged.
> This is not the result of a falling population. Japan has experienced the same “return to the city” wave as other nations.
A philosophical question: is it ever okay for someone to have to move away to find affordable housing? Or do we say that once someone becomes resident of a community, they should be able to live there forever?
(This isn't just renting; there are similar issues with home owners and property tax increases.)
I think the greater context here misses the trauma behind being forced to move out of a home. Being separated from your social network, familiar surroundings, into a new and unknown environment can be highly traumatizing to the people who move and the community which loses its members. Children have their educations interrupted, elders lose a family of support, adults need to forge new friendships in a time where we know the majority of friendships occur in childhood.
The greater question is if it's okay for someone to undergo the trauma of being moved because they can no longer afford the geographic location that they didn't choose to be born and raised into.
Does it have to be a trauma? After all, most people don't live with their parents forever. Finding your own place is a rite of passage.
Most college students graduate and move somewhere else.
One way of preventing trauma would be to make sure people don't have to move. Another way would be to make moving something to look forward to, rather than a trauma.
Yes, of course having to move due to no longer being able to afford living in the place you've lived on for say 10+ years, downsizing probably not only in living space, but also quality of surroundings, is comparable to leaving your college dorm in your early 20s. I guess one way of preventing trauma is pretending it doesn't exist by making ridiculus comparisons.
> Another way would be to make moving something to look forward to, rather than a trauma.
This assumes your own lived experience is prescriptively good for everyone else. There's more than one way to the same goal.
Let's put the situation another way. At a certain socioeconomic strata, which describes most of HN's readership, networking is loosely coupled to one's geographic nexus. Walk the gradient beyond that strata with decreasing incomes, and networking increasingly and greatly emphasizes a locus.
Blithely dismissing these different networking modalities devastates the value built up by the networks but not registered in the official econometrics. The neighbors that trade shade tree mechanic automotive fixes for a quarter-fridge-large pile of tamales. The elderly couple who get groceries delivered in trade for watching out for suspicious activity while a young family is away at pre-K and work. The general contracting single dad who builds a porch in exchange for math and SAT tutoring for his daughter. The BBQ block parties done on the cheap instead of at a restaurant or a rented meeting space, where more of these trades are discovered and initiated, often not as quid pro quo trades but just neighbor helping neighbor when an opportunity to help arises.
These arrangements take decades to establish into thriving networks because human trust is either hugely expensive to enforce, or hugely time-consuming to ascertain. These communities are capital starved (especially so if you want to enforce trust via attorneys), so they trade time and evolved cooperative relationships for capital. No amount of "gig economy" unicorn'ism will pencil out to less capital outlay by these residents than a richly diverse network with deeply-established trust protocols.
Break up these networks and you impoverish those forced to move away in a very real economic sense, even though it isn't measured. It just comes out in stories of misery that are then blamed upon poor people too lazy to "look forward to" their change.
Social networks are certainly important and I don't mean to dismiss anything. Instead I'm suggesting that there may be more than one way to deal with a problem, but this is rarely discussed. What can be done to help people make connections after a move?
> What can be done to help people make connections after a move?
That's asking a programmer, after a death march shipping at all cost ditching any notion of version control/QA/TDD/etc., 99% of the budget spent, and a bug is found in the field, "What can be done to help us never make this kind of mistake again?"
By the time people are forced out of long-time homes and moved away, the majority of damage is already done in most cases. If they are relatively young and resilient, then they might recover. But you're never going to erase the precarity they experience in the meantime, and at the ragged edges, that precarity is all it takes for many to plunge them over the abyss into homeless desperation.
Going further up the methodology stack so to speak, there are any number of remedies available and discussed to death. Acta non verba though, so I'm doing what I can within my own personal scope.
Your ancestors could handle a trip across the country (or an ocean) where half the people died along the way, but people can't handle moving out of some shitty midwestern town entirely supported by the coal plant that's scheduled to shut down to pursue a job because the local Church and T-ball league they're involved with is there?
I'm increasingly not sure the boom in population has been worth it for humanity if these are the kinds of people we're dragging along.
I would make the suggestion to practice good-faith examination as to why I would state that moving under economic pressure is traumatic. It isn't "local Church and T-ball". It's "local Church, whose pastor is the only person who supported me when I was assaulted in school". It's "T-ball league, where my son has developed lifelong friendships that I'm ripping him out of". Humans need their social network to survive. Moving strips them of their social network and forces them to build again, much of it less successful than the original.
This is a distinctly different claim than my claim that it is traumatic to be forced to move and the subsequent non understanding what is traumatic about it. Instead it is a claim that the trauma does not matter. I would then argue that it does matter, in that the lack of compassion towards traumatic events actually prevents efficient calculations in understanding why people don’t move or why assuming people will learn to adapt isn’t necessarily reflective of reality. The claim is not that people will not adapt, but that the quality of their lives will be fundamentally lowered as a result of being forced to move, due to massive loss in human interaction infrastructure. That this doesn’t matter to you is your choice, of course. I’m merely stating that this is a consequence that should be acknowledged during the transition period.
An intelligent species would not have fallen into a number of traps that we are in today.
Defense spending, arms races, nuclear stockpiles, tobacco companies paying out settlements from past harm by inflicting future harm, races to the bottom, etc.
All of these are, when you take a step back, insane.
These article are pretty ridiculous and I see this political bent more and more on here.
The article/book makes a huge leap in assuming progressive cities are somehow worse at housing. The reality is people actually want to live there.
The most densely populated cities in the US, and in general all cities, lean left politically. Finding new housing is important but we're really losing perspective on how successful these policies have been historically.
Its a silly as writing an article about NASCAR crashes. They must be terrible drivers.
The problem is, I've been hearing about these problems since I lived there in 1995.
1995 would have given an intelligent species enough time to build a money-losing, poor-people housing skyscraper or two. Yes building vertically in crowded places is a challenge and expensive but those are just excuses.
Since 1995 they could have figured out a way to get the job done, so now we have to examine what the problems are.
But again, you're starting at the point of assuming failure, when in fact these cities are the most dense. Feel free to examine but the core assumption that this is obviously the wrong way to do it is baseless.
I am all for vertical build but this idea is scary. The standards for maintaining tall buildings are especially high. There is a high chance this ends up being Kowloon city or going down in flames like Grenfell Tower.
Let alone the political optics of putting a lot of poor people into a very limited space.
Isn't that what the "towers in a park" style of public housing from the 60s and 70s are? From that we've found that it isn't a good solution, eg Cabrini–Green Homes or Robert Taylor Homes
I think people have been looking into these issues for far longer than 1995.
Speaking as someone who works in this field theres a lot weve learned about towers. Suffice to say dont build them in the middle of nowhere, for the poorest in society only, and with acres of non-defensible space in front.
The best planning in cities today is building transit oriented development at a scale to match your city's housing need. Do it in the right places with a reasonable design and it works great
I don't think the issues that emerged at Cabrini Green and Robert Taylor Homes can be blamed primarily on their design. I suspect the systemic lack of maintenance and overall poor management were far more significant factors. There are thousands of safe, clean, and healthy "towers in the park" public housing projects around the world - from Singapore to Spain. And there are plenty of low-rise and townhome public housing projects in the US that suffer from health and safety problems.
> 1995 would have given an intelligent species enough time to build a money-losing, poor-people housing skyscraper or two.
Welcome to planet Earth. We humans are intelligent as individuals, but not as a species. At species level, we're just gradient descenders with delusions of grandeur.
Grew up in Houston and now live in Austin and your statement is 100% accurate. Housing in Houston means you can get an 1800 ft house for 90k 15 miles from downtown. In Northwest Austin, let’s say 20 miles from the city center, such a house would cost 300k plus.
I've never lived in either place. How is the transit there? In SF and Los Angeles, 20 mile could mean an hour commute. We do bump up against natural obstacles but it could certainly be better.
If one studies basic microeconomics, then one understand the concept of "market failure" or market inefficiency. They include rent-seeking, externalities, and information asymmetry.
The housing shortage is nothing more than a classic case of rent-seeking, which in this case is that special interests, for example, wealthy landlords, using politics to create an artificial scarcity of land through zoning density restrictions. The typically Democratic city councils are bought out by the wealthy landlord special interests and everyone else is harmed, including basic wealth creation (the wealthy landlords are not creating wealth but are taking their unfair share through political influence).
The Democratic city councils, while publicly critical of Trump, actually embrace policies of zoning density restrictions that make Trump far, far wealthier than he would be in an efficient market and normal people far poorer.
The fix to the housing crisis is quite simple: remove the market failures, eliminate the zoning density restrictions.
Japan did just that almost 20 years ago by having a federal law that override local zoning density restrictions. The result: in 2014, in Tokyo alone, 140,000 housing units built. NYC only 20,000 and all of California about 90,000.
In today's world, a fundamental course in Economics should be required just as basic courses in English and writing are required. It is astonishing how many college students and college grads don't understand even the most basic concepts for microeconomics and market failures.
It does appear to also be a problem in Tokyo [1] Houston's economy is still recovering from a natural disaster [2]
Are we sure this is not simply the product of a global shift towards populations migrating to urban centers? And maybe we might want to look at what is causing this rapid migration? For example economic growth has almost always gone hand in hand with rapid urban migration.
"We know of no coun-
tries that either achieved high incomes or rapid growth without substantial
urbanization, often quite rapid." [3]
So it appears that your solution to reducing housing prices, caused by economic growth, is to increase construction, which causes economic growth, which causes urbanization, which then leads us back to rising housing prices.
Those prices are still substantially lower than they are in NYC or San Francisco. Notice also that despite the volatility the current price is ~3% higher than it was when record keeping began a decade ago. This is significantly below the rate of inflation. And the bottom of that graph isn't at zero -- it's also exaggerating the level of volatility.
> Houston's economy is still recovering from a natural disaster
That would be relevant if they were problematically high prior to the hurricane.
But would you prefer San Antonio? Phoenix? Jacksonville?
> What am I missing here?
Saturation. If the NYC metro area (8683 sq mi) had the population density of Mumbai (73,837/sq mi), it would have population 641 million. The US population is 325 million. Therefore that population density is impossible in the NYC metro area (without a massive, implausible degree of international immigration exceeding what's permitted under existing law). Moreover, it can absorb even fewer additional people at the same time as the same occurs in San Francisco, Chicago, Dallas, Boston, Los Angeles, etc.
There exists a point where there is enough housing for everyone who wants to live in that city, at which point building more does not attract new residents, it only lowers prices for existing residents (as more landlords compete to not be the one with an empty unit).
Can some explain why affordable housing is a problem that requires government policies to prevent? For example, I can't afford a home in Malibu, so I don't live there. I don't understand the issue. Why does government need to step in and fix this?
It is a problem when not just Malibu, but the entirety of Los Angeles becomes unaffordable. Then people with less means need to live very far away from where they work, etc.
I grew up in LA and left because it was unaffordable. So I don't understand the "crisis." Why can't people just move. Seems like the crisis is that maybe people have no mobility and are forced to work in over priced cities. But I don't understand why that is the case.
Rather than stepping in, the government really needs to step out of preventing infill development. AKA, the problem is created in a large part because of the government’s existing policies, thus they should change.
While not a federal, or even state issue it is very much a locality issue. One which is unique to a given locality and is well within their rights to legislate.
It's for the same reason right to farm laws exist, no community wants to give up its right of self direction to outsiders. Even if in many ways it's not to benifit of its neighbors.
Right, if people who live there want to prevent apartments from being built, that will drive up costs. Why does that need to be prevented? Why is the lack of affordable housing a crisis?
Eventually it seems the market will level out. If people can't afford to live there then industries will leave. At that point people living there will have to decide if that's okay or they should change policy to be more accompanying.
Most communities try and walk a fine line trying to prevent boom and bust cycles.
While creative destruction is a necessary part of free market theory it is beyond scary when it comes to peoples communities. That fear and the reality that some of the losers of the market correction are people that one may know personally are why that true free market is never seen in housing.
When community activist groups combined with grand standing politicians can intimidate builders into giving up a fourth if not more of their units at below costs and best yet turned over to "management groups" appointed by the activist groups who are but extensions of the politicians election machine what do you expect?
You can find stories similar to such all over the place. San Francisco recently had a 117 unit fall apart after all the conditions and accommodations of all "aggrieved" parties got their share and drove the costs beyond profitability.
of course you get the typical political bs from the politicians and activist who always claim "if developers are willing to work with us they can get approved quickly" but that is the rub, the approval usually requires far too much outlay on the builder which in combination of set asides for "affordable" units then forces the rest of the units up a tier or two eliminating the market the developer was aiming for.
this isn't about affordable anything, its about political power and money. many of these "activist" groups which claim to represent the people and use that as a basis to go to court to block builders are in fact merely extensions of various political election campaigns.
This is a very insightful article. Every discussion about high prices in cities usually ends into a big argument about rent control, but, in my opinion this is rarely the real issue. Rent control laws in the US are rather weak, and the percentage of rent controlled units is ever decreasing.
I think this article points to a much more important issue. And that is existing real estate owners acting to keep the value of their holdings as high as possible, i.e., to keep prices as high as possible. A lot of the wealth in America is locked up in real estate and this is especially the case in large cities. The landowner lobby (although they do not call themselves that) is quite powerful.
Actually the fact that rent control comes up so often as an issue is just another piece of evidence that the landowner lobby is so powerful that they are able to completely control the conversation. When faced with what is basically an accusation that they are gouging the population they turn it around and declare that the few weak laws that slightly reduce their ability to gouge are really the problem.
And while rent control is a point of contention, the real way the landowner lobby keeps prices high is by restricting new construction. This is a much more important factor than rent control.
A very important issue here is that homeowners and landlords are much more active in most political processes. If one person decides that he will dedicate his life on ownership of land and will make that the main source of his income, he will easily see that it is important to devote time and energy in a lot of the rather tedious local political processes. If a second person decides to dedicate his life to some type of profession or art instead, then local politics tend to become a bore and a time waster. But then the second person is not at the table when important decisions are made and his interests are negatively impacted.
So the general answer is to be more active in politics. But how to be more active in politics?
Here is an issue that the article did not really touch upon. The most important requirement for more construction and higher density living is the availability of infrastructure. Nobody will approve high density buildings without the infrastructure, nobody wants to create Mumbai style tenement cities.
And the most important and most expensive part of infrastructure is transportation. Look at any successful large city in the world -- they are usually defined by their subway system. After all the subway is the only sane way to move large number of people around in a very dense environment.
In fact the main battle against development of LA has been fought for the last 20-30 years over the LA subway. There have been some very successful attempts to slow down and block the development of the subway launched mostly by neighborhood groups. As a result the subway came in much later than originally planned and the most important and most desired line (the purple line) is still only a tiny fraction of what it should be.
So if you want to help create more housing it is always best to vote in favor of new transportation projects, especially high density high efficiency projects, like the subway.
“Progressive” gentrified, upper middle class and above and predominantly white while I have no idological problems when these form naturally through a free market I would call them exactly progressive either.
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[ 1.6 ms ] story [ 168 ms ] threadWe can argue about how to do ‘inclusive housing’ but the idea that it immediately precludes high home prices doesn’t hold up to basic inspection.
This is a classic political maneuver. Build two units out of a thousand with regulated prices, then declare victory because you can point to one person paying an affordable price, even though it's being sold below market at restricted volumes and isn't available to everyone.
If the same units were available at that price but in unrestricted quantity to every member of the public, the high prices of competing housing would fall.
"Tenant protection" -- especially rent control -- is a nontrivial cause of the shortage of new construction. High rents are a signal to developers that there is money to be made constructing new housing. If it's not possible to make the money, they won't do the construction, which is what rent control causes.
You get a population of existing residents with rent controlled apartments, who then have no incentive to fix the housing shortage or eliminate rent control, but insufficient construction going on and consequently even higher prices for people who didn't get a rent controlled apartment in 1975.
(Restrictive zoning is another, independent cause of the same problem, and the two compound each other.)
We’ve built a system where humans are expected to somehow accrue interest at the whim of the capitalist overlord. The soul of rent control is pretty important, so maybe rent control needs to evolve?
I’m hard pressed to defend it completely because it seems like dancing around the fundamental problem of capitalism not being in alignment with the best interests of society.
It's just math. The land costs a million dollars, the construction costs $500K, therefore the net present value of the future rents (less property taxes, insurance, etc.) has to be $1.5M, or the construction does not occur. Rent control puts the marginal construction project below the break-even point.
> We’ve built a system where humans are expected to somehow accrue interest at the whim of the capitalist overlord. The soul of rent control is pretty important, so maybe rent control needs to evolve?
The soul of rent control is bad math. If you want lower rents, adopt policies that encourage housing construction until rents are suitably low. At which point, who needs rent control?
While it may sound socially just it is also one of most un-progressive (conservative) things you can imagine. It literally conserves the population of a given district.
Neither is fair, but both are unfair in different ways. Your preference for market distribution, as opposed to lottery distribution (which is what rent control essentially is) is largely an ideological one.
And only one of them makes it possible for both you and the person with more money than you to have an apartment.
You can't be progressive and conservative at the same time! You can barely be progressive if you hold conservative view on one of the most important issues. You can only be centrist that way.
And yet that is the phrase we use, because people do feel a sense of ownership about their living space even when legally they have no ownership. A lot of these policies come down to how much we want to back that feeling up with legal rights.
Can't speak for him, but if you believe a free market has the same housing results are as a centrally planned market, well, damn.
Well, who said conservative is bad?
It's about the interests of this or that group (e.g. given population vs people coming from outside). Arguments can be made for either, but if a given population is not protected, then those coming from outside wont be protected (from people coming from outside later on) either.
People build cities to be protected and prosper long time in them, not to give opportunities to third parties to come and displace them from the places they've built and helped grow.
> People build cities to be protected and prosper long time in them, not to give opportunities to third parties to come and displace them from the places they've built and helped grow.
Well you're basically repeating Donald Trump's words when he explains why he wants to build a wall, and last time I have checked nobody calls him progressive.
Just do s/cities/countries/ and you're all set.
Because the margins in a different city are 19%, or some entirely different class of investment now has better risk-adjusted returns so the funding falls through.
Can they easily enough move between cities that they could leave a 17% city to chase 19% margins?
The problem is that there are fixed costs associated with building a unit of housing - city approval fees, construction costs, land - which are more or less independent of what kind of housing you're building and how 'luxury' it is. So there is a floor on the cost of housing in any given location. Then you have to factor in lenders and their requirements - how much interest they'll charge and what % of the project cost they'll lend you. Since lenders almost never will lend 100% of the project cost you need equity investors too, and they generally have expected project returns. Of course you can find non-profit entities at all these layers who will help you refuce costs it's hard to out together a project in a major city that is anything less than expensive these days.
you could have different margins and wildly different risk factors, and investment groups will go with the lower risk choice
The only time some type of rent control applies for new buildings is when they are specifically built as "affordable housing". This usually happens when a developer is required to build affordable housing to pay back for some favor he/she received from the city.
That's not how it works in theory...
That's how it works in reality.
That's the problem with most "progressive" theories like rent control... the theory doesn't match reality.
New buildings are what become older buildings. If that causes them to become less valuable, they become less valuable immediately because the future loss gets priced in, making them less valuable to construct.
And older buildings also become newer buildings. In most places with a housing shortage there is already a structure on any given piece of appropriately zoned land. To get more housing, you have to knock something down and replace it with something bigger, or subdivide an existing building with fewer, larger apartments into one with more, smaller ones etc. That can't happen if the building is full of existing rent controlled tenants who can't be removed (and have strong incentives to never leave).
Furthermore, in California the Ellis act allows landlords to mass evict rent controlled tenants in order to demolish a building for new construction, so your second point is not valid either.
That would still apparently prevent the building from being subdivided into smaller units or otherwise reconfigured/improved for higher density.
And your point seems to be not that rent control isn't a problem but rather that some places are already phasing it out -- which is good, but presents no aid to the people who continue to propose expanding it or retaining it in the areas it isn't already on its way out.
How do you replace old buildings with new buildings in this process?
Sure, tenant protection is, but “especially rent control” is wrong: that's just a tenant protection that conservatives/libertarians tend to think is vulnerable to argument. Minimum habitability standards do more to create a lack of affordable housing, but winkingt the argument that that isn't a necessary cost is perceived to be harder, even by the folks who'd really prefer the complete absence of regulation.
It depends how you're measuring. If you mean by "amount of net cost / lost income to property owners" then sure, it's not especially anything because it's exactly anything to the degree that it does that.
But if you measure in terms of value for money, rent control sucks. Requiring landlords to have functioning clean water costs them money, but it also makes them money -- tenants are willing to pay more for an apartment that isn't falling apart. Some things may cost more than they benefit the landlord in making the apartment more valuable, but at least they may come closer to break-even, and the cost in incentive is only the difference between the two. Rent control is pure dead weight loss.
Of course, this is also the argument for why most of the other regulations aren't needed, because anything above break-even would get done anyway -- you don't need a law requiring someone to improve their building in a way that results in a net profit. The apartments that become unmaintained slums are the rent controlled ones, because the rent is sufficiently below market that the tenants would suffer the flaws rather than moving out.
Also, if I owned some property, I am not sure I would want to invest in building new one and have to decrease rent rather than enjoy the fact that the rent is high.
All in all, I suspect that rent control might be quite insignificant factor in housing scarcity. More important is probably lack of actual housing construction financed by government.
https://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/RentControl.html
> Economists are virtually unanimous in concluding that rent controls are destructive. In a 1990 poll of 464 economists published in the May 1992 issue of the American Economic Review, 93 percent of U.S. respondents agreed, either completely or with provisos, that “a ceiling on rents reduces the quantity and quality of housing available.”
Your gut instinct, like most on this issue, is incorrect. When removing rent control, it is going to take time for things to finally settle to the real prices as well as actual development to get started, but its certainly good for the long run to do away with it.
Rent control is not need-based. People across the wealth spectrum enjoy the personal benefits of rent control (in SF there is no shortage of housholds bringing home several hundred thousand dollars a year who pay way below market rents on their rent-controlled apartments).
The problem with getting rid of it is that the benefits of more housing supply relative to demand would probably take decades to come to fruition. But the pain of suddenly losing rent control (for the percentage of people who actually do need it) is felt immediately. Who cares if your city will have lots of cheap housing in a decade if you can't pay rent next month?
"People across the wealth spectrum" do NOT enjoy rent control. It gets gamed and abused. The bulk of SF is rent controlled, resulting in more and more people cramming into places that don't get maintained and they're not able to move out of when situations like their job changes. This is a disaster, nobody can move to be closer to work. Only a tiny amount of market rate housing is available for new residents which is disproportionately high because the rest of the market is severely under-priced.
You will never stop everyone from getting priced out. That is just the nature of things, but you can save a lot more people that pain than we do now due to foolish policies like rent control and awful zoning.
Property values are not the same as rents or general housing costs. As soon as you make construction more profitable, it makes the land worth more -- property values go up. But then the construction happens and housing costs, i.e. price per unit, go down as a result of more units.
Before you had two housing units on $500K in land going for $1000/month. After the land is worth $2M but it has 20 housing units going for $750 -- and the landlord is making more revenue, because 20x$750 is more than 2x$1000, enough to offset the higher property cost.
> Also, if I owned some property, I am not sure I would want to invest in building new one and have to decrease rent rather than enjoy the fact that the rent is high.
Rent doesn't materially decrease as a result of one person building one building, it's a result of many new buildings across the city. So your choice isn't between the existing two units at $1000 and twenty new ones at $750 (though even that itself is still profitable), because if you do nothing the existing units will still fall to $750 each as a result of what other people do once they're allowed to do it.
> More important is probably lack of actual housing construction financed by government.
Actual construction subsidies might help when you have a massive shortage and you want it correct it quickly, but in general it isn't necessary -- when rents are high and construction is permitted, it happens.
Cant speak for prague, but if you remove rent-controls, rent is going to go up, simlpy because suppressed rent values will go up.
If volume remained the same, you would expect to see a decrease in some properties and a high increase in the de-regulated ones.
Bear in mind that there is also elasticity: if more properties go on the market and prices go down, you could see a higher volume of people coming in. That's a much better metric of success than price.
You may not be in that population but you have to solve for them as well. Removing rent control is only going to price them out.
There is a suitable way to phase this out. First, never create another new rent controlled apartment -- they only exist as preexisting, can't be transferred to anyone but a spouse, and can't be transferred more than once. Second, allow the landlord the option to provide a comparable replacement apartment in a different building at the same rent, so that buildings with existing rent controlled apartments can be replaced with higher density ones.
Then in general adopt long-term policies to keep market-rate housing prices under control, so that they don't rise faster than inflation and future generations have no need for a ridiculous price control because the market price becomes and remains affordable.
A recipient of rent control has had enormous subsidies and economic appreciation, and even then it is not enough, you need to give them more.
There are multiple ways to bust this open. The first one is allowing rent controllees to sublet. If you want to maintain their status, at least let them profit by housing more people, making themselves richer and lowering rents for the whole market.
No. Houston is centrist, which for a city is right-leaning.
Interestingly, it is policies like prop 13 in California that restrict the revenue needed to invest in the infrastructure to support higher population densities.
[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities...
Gotta support our struggling petroleum industry!
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2016/08/th...
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2016/08/la...
> Here is a startling fact: in 2014 there were 142,417 housing starts in the city of Tokyo (population 13.3m, no empty land), more than the 83,657 housing permits issued in the state of California (population 38.7m), or the 137,010 houses started in the entire country of England (population 54.3m).
> Tokyo’s steady construction is linked to a still more startling fact. In contrast to the enormous house price booms that have distorted western cities — setting young against old, redistributing wealth to the already wealthy, and denying others the chance to move to where the good jobs are — the cost of property in Japan’s capital has hardly budged.
> This is not the result of a falling population. Japan has experienced the same “return to the city” wave as other nations.
(This isn't just renting; there are similar issues with home owners and property tax increases.)
The greater question is if it's okay for someone to undergo the trauma of being moved because they can no longer afford the geographic location that they didn't choose to be born and raised into.
Most college students graduate and move somewhere else.
One way of preventing trauma would be to make sure people don't have to move. Another way would be to make moving something to look forward to, rather than a trauma.
(And if you don't like that scenario either, maybe you can come up with a better one?)
This assumes your own lived experience is prescriptively good for everyone else. There's more than one way to the same goal.
Let's put the situation another way. At a certain socioeconomic strata, which describes most of HN's readership, networking is loosely coupled to one's geographic nexus. Walk the gradient beyond that strata with decreasing incomes, and networking increasingly and greatly emphasizes a locus.
Blithely dismissing these different networking modalities devastates the value built up by the networks but not registered in the official econometrics. The neighbors that trade shade tree mechanic automotive fixes for a quarter-fridge-large pile of tamales. The elderly couple who get groceries delivered in trade for watching out for suspicious activity while a young family is away at pre-K and work. The general contracting single dad who builds a porch in exchange for math and SAT tutoring for his daughter. The BBQ block parties done on the cheap instead of at a restaurant or a rented meeting space, where more of these trades are discovered and initiated, often not as quid pro quo trades but just neighbor helping neighbor when an opportunity to help arises.
These arrangements take decades to establish into thriving networks because human trust is either hugely expensive to enforce, or hugely time-consuming to ascertain. These communities are capital starved (especially so if you want to enforce trust via attorneys), so they trade time and evolved cooperative relationships for capital. No amount of "gig economy" unicorn'ism will pencil out to less capital outlay by these residents than a richly diverse network with deeply-established trust protocols.
Break up these networks and you impoverish those forced to move away in a very real economic sense, even though it isn't measured. It just comes out in stories of misery that are then blamed upon poor people too lazy to "look forward to" their change.
That's asking a programmer, after a death march shipping at all cost ditching any notion of version control/QA/TDD/etc., 99% of the budget spent, and a bug is found in the field, "What can be done to help us never make this kind of mistake again?"
By the time people are forced out of long-time homes and moved away, the majority of damage is already done in most cases. If they are relatively young and resilient, then they might recover. But you're never going to erase the precarity they experience in the meantime, and at the ragged edges, that precarity is all it takes for many to plunge them over the abyss into homeless desperation.
Going further up the methodology stack so to speak, there are any number of remedies available and discussed to death. Acta non verba though, so I'm doing what I can within my own personal scope.
Your ancestors could handle a trip across the country (or an ocean) where half the people died along the way, but people can't handle moving out of some shitty midwestern town entirely supported by the coal plant that's scheduled to shut down to pursue a job because the local Church and T-ball league they're involved with is there?
I'm increasingly not sure the boom in population has been worth it for humanity if these are the kinds of people we're dragging along.
Defense spending, arms races, nuclear stockpiles, tobacco companies paying out settlements from past harm by inflicting future harm, races to the bottom, etc.
All of these are, when you take a step back, insane.
The article/book makes a huge leap in assuming progressive cities are somehow worse at housing. The reality is people actually want to live there.
The most densely populated cities in the US, and in general all cities, lean left politically. Finding new housing is important but we're really losing perspective on how successful these policies have been historically.
Its a silly as writing an article about NASCAR crashes. They must be terrible drivers.
1995 would have given an intelligent species enough time to build a money-losing, poor-people housing skyscraper or two. Yes building vertically in crowded places is a challenge and expensive but those are just excuses.
Since 1995 they could have figured out a way to get the job done, so now we have to examine what the problems are.
Let alone the political optics of putting a lot of poor people into a very limited space.
I think people have been looking into these issues for far longer than 1995.
The best planning in cities today is building transit oriented development at a scale to match your city's housing need. Do it in the right places with a reasonable design and it works great
Welcome to planet Earth. We humans are intelligent as individuals, but not as a species. At species level, we're just gradient descenders with delusions of grandeur.
Since 1995 they could have figured out a way to get the job done
If only someone tried. I mean, for how long have people agreed on what "the job" is? Too long, if at all?
The housing shortage is nothing more than a classic case of rent-seeking, which in this case is that special interests, for example, wealthy landlords, using politics to create an artificial scarcity of land through zoning density restrictions. The typically Democratic city councils are bought out by the wealthy landlord special interests and everyone else is harmed, including basic wealth creation (the wealthy landlords are not creating wealth but are taking their unfair share through political influence).
The Democratic city councils, while publicly critical of Trump, actually embrace policies of zoning density restrictions that make Trump far, far wealthier than he would be in an efficient market and normal people far poorer.
The fix to the housing crisis is quite simple: remove the market failures, eliminate the zoning density restrictions.
Japan did just that almost 20 years ago by having a federal law that override local zoning density restrictions. The result: in 2014, in Tokyo alone, 140,000 housing units built. NYC only 20,000 and all of California about 90,000.
In today's world, a fundamental course in Economics should be required just as basic courses in English and writing are required. It is astonishing how many college students and college grads don't understand even the most basic concepts for microeconomics and market failures.
For further reading: Havard Economist Edward Glaeser: Build Big, Bill (NYC Mayor). https://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/build-big-bill-article-1...
1) Because the incentives for enacting the bad policies are widespread, so the bad policies are widespread, so the problem is widespread.
2) It isn't. See cities like Houston and Tokyo which have lower housing costs than San Francisco or NYC.
Are we sure this is not simply the product of a global shift towards populations migrating to urban centers? And maybe we might want to look at what is causing this rapid migration? For example economic growth has almost always gone hand in hand with rapid urban migration.
"We know of no coun- tries that either achieved high incomes or rapid growth without substantial urbanization, often quite rapid." [3]
So it appears that your solution to reducing housing prices, caused by economic growth, is to increase construction, which causes economic growth, which causes urbanization, which then leads us back to rising housing prices.
What am I missing here?
[1] http://japanpropertycentral.com/2018/02/rent-in-tokyo-reache...
[2] http://cokinoslaw.com/flood-hurricane-harveys-180-billion-im...
[3] https://siteresources.worldbank.org/EXTPREMNET/Resources/489...
Those prices are still substantially lower than they are in NYC or San Francisco. Notice also that despite the volatility the current price is ~3% higher than it was when record keeping began a decade ago. This is significantly below the rate of inflation. And the bottom of that graph isn't at zero -- it's also exaggerating the level of volatility.
> Houston's economy is still recovering from a natural disaster
That would be relevant if they were problematically high prior to the hurricane.
But would you prefer San Antonio? Phoenix? Jacksonville?
> What am I missing here?
Saturation. If the NYC metro area (8683 sq mi) had the population density of Mumbai (73,837/sq mi), it would have population 641 million. The US population is 325 million. Therefore that population density is impossible in the NYC metro area (without a massive, implausible degree of international immigration exceeding what's permitted under existing law). Moreover, it can absorb even fewer additional people at the same time as the same occurs in San Francisco, Chicago, Dallas, Boston, Los Angeles, etc.
There exists a point where there is enough housing for everyone who wants to live in that city, at which point building more does not attract new residents, it only lowers prices for existing residents (as more landlords compete to not be the one with an empty unit).
Because progressives don't like the poor, they just hate the rich.
It's for the same reason right to farm laws exist, no community wants to give up its right of self direction to outsiders. Even if in many ways it's not to benifit of its neighbors.
Eventually it seems the market will level out. If people can't afford to live there then industries will leave. At that point people living there will have to decide if that's okay or they should change policy to be more accompanying.
While creative destruction is a necessary part of free market theory it is beyond scary when it comes to peoples communities. That fear and the reality that some of the losers of the market correction are people that one may know personally are why that true free market is never seen in housing.
You can find stories similar to such all over the place. San Francisco recently had a 117 unit fall apart after all the conditions and accommodations of all "aggrieved" parties got their share and drove the costs beyond profitability.
of course you get the typical political bs from the politicians and activist who always claim "if developers are willing to work with us they can get approved quickly" but that is the rub, the approval usually requires far too much outlay on the builder which in combination of set asides for "affordable" units then forces the rest of the units up a tier or two eliminating the market the developer was aiming for.
this isn't about affordable anything, its about political power and money. many of these "activist" groups which claim to represent the people and use that as a basis to go to court to block builders are in fact merely extensions of various political election campaigns.
I think this article points to a much more important issue. And that is existing real estate owners acting to keep the value of their holdings as high as possible, i.e., to keep prices as high as possible. A lot of the wealth in America is locked up in real estate and this is especially the case in large cities. The landowner lobby (although they do not call themselves that) is quite powerful.
Actually the fact that rent control comes up so often as an issue is just another piece of evidence that the landowner lobby is so powerful that they are able to completely control the conversation. When faced with what is basically an accusation that they are gouging the population they turn it around and declare that the few weak laws that slightly reduce their ability to gouge are really the problem.
And while rent control is a point of contention, the real way the landowner lobby keeps prices high is by restricting new construction. This is a much more important factor than rent control.
A very important issue here is that homeowners and landlords are much more active in most political processes. If one person decides that he will dedicate his life on ownership of land and will make that the main source of his income, he will easily see that it is important to devote time and energy in a lot of the rather tedious local political processes. If a second person decides to dedicate his life to some type of profession or art instead, then local politics tend to become a bore and a time waster. But then the second person is not at the table when important decisions are made and his interests are negatively impacted.
So the general answer is to be more active in politics. But how to be more active in politics?
Here is an issue that the article did not really touch upon. The most important requirement for more construction and higher density living is the availability of infrastructure. Nobody will approve high density buildings without the infrastructure, nobody wants to create Mumbai style tenement cities.
And the most important and most expensive part of infrastructure is transportation. Look at any successful large city in the world -- they are usually defined by their subway system. After all the subway is the only sane way to move large number of people around in a very dense environment.
In fact the main battle against development of LA has been fought for the last 20-30 years over the LA subway. There have been some very successful attempts to slow down and block the development of the subway launched mostly by neighborhood groups. As a result the subway came in much later than originally planned and the most important and most desired line (the purple line) is still only a tiny fraction of what it should be.
So if you want to help create more housing it is always best to vote in favor of new transportation projects, especially high density high efficiency projects, like the subway.