Have you had many conversations on the topic with the typical person on the street? I have (among other things, I’ve collected signatures for ballot measures), and I think about as many people think high housing prices are caused by allowing new development as restricting it.
People see newly constructed "luxury" housing. They also see techies that can outbid them on rent. They mix up cause and effect and assume that it's the luxury housing that's bringing in all the techies rather than vice versa.
Development can sometimes increase demand for previously blighted urban areas. A few years ago, I used to live in expensive re-purposed lofts in an area of Boston metro which was in disrepair in the 90s. There’s a similar story for Bushwick and Williamsburg in NYC.
However, by the time an area has become popular, restricting development will only hurt rent affordability. I guess some would like to prevent their neighborhoods from becoming popular in the first place though.
They see new builds hitting the market and look at the (aspirational) price put there by the builder. It's a borderline conspiracy that Zillow lists certain high-end new developments for a year (before they're built) which pollutes the "for sale" housing inventory. Whereas the "recently sold" is the best metric of how things actually are, the search options don't allow you to get an accurate market sense from these. After all, the app's purpose is not to give you an accurate sense of the market.
"New development" covers a wide range of development types. Most of the types that are "allowed" to be developed - per regulation, public investment, what does and doesn't trigger the NIMBY predatory instinct - are types that raise "market rates" like low-density SFH and luxury condos.* The government could "radically incentivize" developers to build high-density housing with basic finishes and fewer amenities, to be sold or rented at affordable rates, but that bumps up against https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36632171's impeccably correct observation: prices are high because the people who own the housing stock want them to be high. Inventory influences a fraction of the cost.
*(That is, however far you're convinced that there even is a market; for rent, thanks to "discounts" that allow property owners to avoid actually advertising lower rates, supply and demand don't exist, only the imperative to raise rates annually.)
It’s “invisible” in that it’s one of those things people (especially property owners) prefer not to talk or think about. Like how most people grossly discriminate based on perceived appearance or attractiveness. No one wants to admit that they are part of the problem.
It's also just not true in a lot of areas. I live in an area where nearly every house is already an apartment building or a 100-year old mansion converted to condos or apartments. New construction is all multi-family and transit-oriented. Prices are still high because there's just too many damn people trying to live here.
The problem is not that there isn't enough housing in any one particular area. There are a lot of issues with the argument that everyone everywhere just needs to build as much as possible, no matter what, and it's disingenuous to any such argument as NIMBYism.
The problem is that there aren't enough nice places that are actually comfortable to live: good access to transit, access to green spaces, not too much traffic, access to shopping and grocery stores, etc. This is broadly because of how American cities and towns are designed.
Tokyo meets all of your listed criteria (though prohibiting on-street car storage is a big part of that) and they’ve been able to keep prices reasonable by allowing supply to meet demand. I think a lot of urbanists want American cities to grow in that direction: way more housing, huge transit investments, less subsidy for driving.
I own two properties, both of which I was lucky enough to be able to afford before the housing crises. Even though I could sell and get a lot more than I paid for either, the fact is that unless I wanted to put that money into something other than a house I'm not going to turn a profit.
I also have two daughters who are young adults and still living at home because they can't afford rent. So even for that reason alone I REALLY don't want expensive housing prices.
> Even though I could sell and get a lot more than I paid for either, the fact is that unless I wanted to put that money into something other than a house I'm not going to turn a profit.
You’re already profiting simply by having a higher net worth.
The benefit comes from gains being definitively accumulated by percentage. When your owned amount is higher, equal percent gain is greater absolute gain.
> Gains are locked into a property until sold or mortgaged.
This is essentially the equivalent of "Gains are locked into money until spent on goods or services." True. But gains are gains and worth is worth regardless of how many seconds or minutes it takes to spend. The only difference is immediate urgency of conversion within a very narrow time window (it does not take that long to get a mortgage on an owned property that is now worth X percent more than it was yesteryear).
To an accountant you might have a point. To me, if it doesn't have a direct and measurable impact on my quality of life then it's a completely irrelevant factor.
Maybe "profit" was a poor choice of words. But this has turned into an utterly meaningless semantic argument that has nothing to do with the point I was trying to make.
Is feeling secure in retirement not a relevant factor? Is having wealth to do things, even if you don’t exercise that wealth, a completely irrelevant factor? Is leaving generational wealth for your children irrelevant? Let’s say you had to forfeit the houses for some reason (being sued, for example). According to you, owning the houses is an completely irrelevant factor, so I’m safe to assume you would feel totally indifferent to this happening? Somehow, I find it hard to believe that you wouldn’t care about losing your houses. Perhaps it does have some relevance to your life?
> According to you, owning the houses is an completely irrelevant factor
No, they're saying the price of the house is irrelevant. If they bought both houses for $250k, say they're now worth $750k, they're a millionaire and got a million dollars of profit!
Their point is they need two houses for their family and will until they die. If they have two houses still worth $250k or two houses worth $750k it doesn't matter to their quality of life.
This would be true if we lived in a society where value of assetsd you own has no impact on access to and cost of financing, and other advantages, that can be realized without sacrificing the assets, but that is very much not the world we actually live in.
> To me, if it doesn't have a direct and measurable impact on my quality of life then it's a completely irrelevant factor.
If having more money available to you through conversion doesn't have a direct and measurable impact on your quality of life, that's exclusively because of decisions you make about what to do with it. Assets don't follow you into the afterlife, so, bare minimum, when you get old you can sell it and rent or put a mortgage on it and have a much bigger pile of cash to spend until you die than the person with the less valuable house would.
Or, if you have children and are into such things, you can engage in massive generational wealth transfer and make it so they never have to work a day in their lives to cover rent. There are a lot of people out there who don't get to experience such a wondrous bounty that they didn't do anything to earn but which is an extremely relevant benefit with extremely measurable impacts on quality of life nonetheless.
If only more people understood that. Almost all homeowners think that rising prices is a good thing for them. Try convincing your average homeowner that the whole market going up by 10% makes no difference to them unless they plan on being homeless.
There's something about money that brings out the worst in people, whether that be malice or simply stupidity.
For a homeowner that is not interested in selling or refinancing, the price going up itself is not good news. It really only means higher property taxes.
However, home prices are, many times, also a reflection of the local economy and the earning and/or spending power of the locals (or tourists). And usually, higher earning/spending power is better than lower earning/spending power.
You just have to ensure you are in position to grab a portion of that economic activity, which is a better situation to be in than trying to grab a portion of no or little economic activity in a struggling region.
In my city, property taxes are set to raise the needed city budget. If everyone’s property value doubled, the city budget would not double, but rather the tax rate per $1K would drop to raise the same revenue.
Over the long term it would have to double since expense for land flows through government expenses, for example when the government needs to buy land or employees want more pay to afford buying houses.
If the nominal value doubled by virtue of debasement of the currency (inflation), then yes all goods and services would double (including property taxes). If only the value of properties doubled in a city, that would increase but not nearly double the required budget as not nearly every cost the city incurs is pegged to property costs.
As an aside, my property has approximately doubled (in Zillow guesstimate and in assessed value) since we bought it in 2007. Our property taxes over that time went from around $8K to around $12K. An inflation calculator over that period would say that $8K in 2007 is worth $11.7K today, suggesting that property taxes track general inflation much more closely than they follow property values.
So, my property has doubled in nominal value, representing a 36% increase in real dollars, while my property taxes have gone up by only 3% in real terms.
Edit to add: inflation of course massively helps mortgage borrowers. If I bought my house for 100 units of currency, borrowing 80 and the currency change worth such that it now takes 147 units of currency to buy the house (just from inflation effects), then I still owe only the original 80 units of the now less valuable currency (minus principal repaid in the meantime). Inflation just paid off over 30% of my mortgage for me.
>only the value of properties doubled in a city, that would increase but not nearly double the required budget as not nearly every cost the city incurs is pegged to property costs.
Correct, but that is because the current politics are all about shifting the burden to future generations, and one of those ways is vis drastic subsidies to land owners from non land owners via undeservedly low land value taxes.
Perhaps my claim of 1 to 1 relationship between property (land value) tax and land/house price is too strong, but at some point, it will have to go higher and catch up.
house prices evolve from price p0 to price p. The market gains (or loses) p/p0 in that period. If you get a mortgage, you're borrowing money to buy at p0; at any point in time with a price p and total repaid r your total value is given by (deposit + r + p) - p0. You're in negative equity if (deposit + r + p) < p0. You're in the money if p > p0, but note that this isn't multiplying your investment by the market gain. Instead, it's exposing you to the absolute change in price. So suppose (deposit + r) = 40k ; p0 = 145k ; p = 190k. You're in the money for 40k + 190k - 145k = 85k, having invested 40k (roi=2.1). p1/p0 = 1.3 (<2.1), with your leverage (mortgage) having bought you more exposure to house prices. You can then liquify and re-lever back into the housing market, with a larger loan due to you larger deposit (and likely increased income). Historically this has worked very well for people as p has tended to be larger than p0. It does not work well if you end up in negative equity.
This is the reason that "you need housing so why would you want house prices to go up" -> some large fraction of homeowners are levered up to their eyeballs
I think this is reasonable. Why should I be able to vote on the policies of, say, Palo Alto, when I live in Cambridge, MA? Same is true in the other direction, of course.
"Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"
There is a method actually though. Voters of the state can vote for state laws that affect all cities, and voters of the nation can vote for national law repesentives that affect all cities.
I think this is reasonable as well, and I wasn't trying to imply it is wrong. My goal was to point out an asymmetry in the system and to give a little more insight into the "homeowners vote, non-homeowners don't" observation of the GP.
And it ultimately seems like politicians have more to fear from the immediate prospect of losing votes from NIMBY constituents than the potential gain of future votes years down the line from grateful new residents.
Specifically, when do they vote and on what do they vote?
If you dig into this you eventually end up with the premise of the article.
In a past life I wanted to build dense housing. i.e. more units per square meter.
I went to buy land, and at the same time started going through the bureaucratic process of getting things approved by the government so that I could start building.
I have the necessary know-how to build what I wanted with my own resources, I was willing to apply for all permits necessary. However, I got turned down flat by the government. The only thing I was allowed to build on this land was ONE house. The land could have fit 15+ houses or an apartment building with dozens of units, but no, the city zoning board had decreed that this land was zoned ONLY to single family housing. So the only thing that could be built on this site was one single family house. Guess who the members of the zoning board were that turned me down? Local homeowners, who did not want to see the character of their neighborhood change.
This is the root of the problem. The free market is not allowed to function, because of this process.
And the thing is: this same process exists in every metro area in the US. Zoning boards populated by local homeowners with no desire to change anything.
The economic incentives already exist for denser, more affordable, housing; but developers are not allowed to build anything other than what the land has been zoned for. The people in charge of that zoning have the opposite incentive, they want their beautiful, low-density, neighborhood to never change.
House prices vary inversely with interest rates. This is by far the biggest influence outside of cities like Sanfrancisco.
Sellers, agents, and banks all want you to pay as much as possible. Want a loan? "What is your monthly income? We'll figure out how much you qualify for." You might be able to resist these forces, but most people can't, and they set the market rates.
Property taxes are low? Where is this the case? Most communities base property taxes on millage (percentage) of property values which have been going sky high.
And PP only profiled one company. It's almost certainly being perpetrated by others. The company my own property manager uses once boasted in their promotional literature that using their software boosted prices 15% when compared to controls. Investors are using this software because it allows them to artificially inflate "market rate" rents in concert with competitors, and disconnected from actual demand, full stop.
It’s really hard to claim price fixing when occupancy rates have been 98% or higher for decades, as is the case of nearly all coastal cities in the US. And I have first hand experience with them dropping prices when demand drops (I literally had my renewal rent drop when there was a short downturn). They’re just a dynamic pricing algorithm, they have no power over supply and demand. And it’s kinda annoying to see this idea trotted out when we obviously have a supply problem.
It's annoying to you to hear that the majority of rental units are effectively controlled by a soulless organization? From the article I linked:
> One of the algorithm’s developers told ProPublica that leasing agents had “too much empathy” compared to computer generated pricing.
The article also has multiple anecdotes that run counter to your own. Just because you saw rents drop in response to demand decline doesn't mean this is what happens in practice most of the time.
> For tenants, the system upends the practice of negotiating with apartment building staff. RealPage discourages bargaining with renters and has even recommended that landlords in some cases accept a lower occupancy rate in order to raise rents and make more money.
> Hutchinson, who is an analyst for the police department, wondered if a computer algorithm was behind building staff’s inflexibility. “It was pretty obvious they should have been dropping prices,” she said. “They were digging their heels in.”
Please remember: this isn't some economics game like the price of cars or eggs. Housing is something you need TO LIVE and for which there is NO SUBSTITUTE. Increasing supply will only go so far, as long as your society allows it to be controlled by entities that see is it as a profit maximization game, you will see horrific outcomes.
Prices were rising dramatically for 50 years before this company even existed. Because supply was restricted. Airlines have been using dynamic pricing for 50 years, and prices are lower now than they were 50 years ago. Because supply was not restricted.
That is all that matters. Get vacancy rates above 10% and maybe then we’ll talk about dynamic pricing boogiemen.
It's invisible because we like to talk about freedom and free market. But there are so many regulations and policies that essentially funnel money and power into the hands of a few. It makes the notion of freedom and free market somewhat farcical. However, any discussion of the above is considered unpatriotic, so it's always better to blame the individual.
I'm not for unbridled capitalism, but if you have ever tried to start a business in even a slightly regulated field (medical, construction, chimney cleaning, a restaurant, general contracting, just being a handyman), the amount of regulation is incredible and overwhelming. Software development doesn't count - it's probably the least regulated field in the country. Even being a hairdresser requires licensing and venue requirements in most states - minorities have been sued for just trying to do hairdressing in their own homes for a few bucks.
Is it fair to call the US a capitalist country? Honestly, I don't think so. It's a weird disastrous mishmash of socialism, capitalism, and English bureaucracy. It's just "more capitalist" than other countries who at least have the intellectual honesty to more fully commit to a system.
There is nothing socialist about the US. The workers do not own the means of production. Labor union membership is in the single digits.
We have some very limited vestiges of social democracy, but social democracy is not socialism. Socialists and social democrats were not allies. Google the meme: “SocDems killed Rosa.”
What you’re observing is what unregulated capitalism will always devolve into. It goes by many names: capitalism, crony capitalism, neoliberalism, corporatism, oligarchy, fascism. But the idea is the same. Labor is violently oppressed. The State only serves the interests of capitalists. The State and Capital are often indistinguishable. There is no competition. There are structural barriers that stifle small businesses and enrich rent seeking trusts. It’s a new Gilded Age, brought to life by a new Lochner era for the Supreme Court.
I have good news and bad news: this system, whatever you call it, is extremely unstable. Its collapse is inevitable, well within the span of a single human lifetime.
Except for the half of the entire federal budget that is spent strictly on wealth redistribution to enhance equity between the rich and the poor - Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid. Seriously, these three programs are fully half of all federal spending.
Not to mention all the state wealth redistribution programs, that cover housing (section 8), food (food stamps), education (public school system for k-12, pell grants above), utilities (utility vouchers), healthcare (ACA), telecom ("obamaphones", broadband vouchers), and more.
I've seen estimates that in the most progressive states, welfare benefits can amount to as much as $42,000 a year for a small family.
You can argue that on a PPP & CoL basis, that isn't much money in e.g. Bay Area (where that is well below poverty level), but that's also a global top 10% income.
To say there is "nothing" socialist about the US is disingenuous, politicized, and pedantic at best. There is substantial social wealth redistribution and there exist substantial worker protections in the USA. You can find plenty of countries with a FAR less socialist nature. In fairness, it is likewise hyperbolic to describe the USA as a communist or even "fully" socialist country.
Defense spending accounts for only a little over a third of what remains, or a bit over a sixth of all spending. Grossly eclipsed by wealth redistribution.
We also spend about a sixth on interest payments.
Everything else the entire federal government does combined is only about one sixth the federal budget.
Indeed. There will be fascinating to see an analysis of how much of the federal budget goes towards programs that all citizens and or do utilize. I suspect the numbers would shock a lot of people
If Medicaid and Medicare were "socialist" in any way whatsoever, we would have Medicaid for All for a fraction of the cost. These programs are so expensive because the "healthcare" system in this country is designed to funnel money into the oligarchs' pockets. It is a capitalist scam that presents the single greatest barrier to American entrepreneurship.
The UK NHS is a socialized healthcare system. The profit motive is not allowed to corrupt any part of the system. Pharmaceutical prices are strictly controlled (none of this $26k/year Alzheimer's drug nonsense). It is fully nationalized. Nationalizing an entire industry in peacetime is often (but not always) associated with socialism.
Even Canada's single payer system is not socialist in any sense of the word. It's just a government-run insurance plan. There are many multi-payer insurance systems in the world that perform far better than ours. Single-payer is not a panacea without price controls. Price controls are somewhat socialist. Funnily enough, the last US president to enact price controls was Richard Nixon, known friend of Marxists across the globe /s.
There's nothing socialist whatsoever about Social Security. It does not redistribute wealth. The tax is infamously capped at the first ~$130k of income you make per year. Any income above the cap is untaxed by Social Security. Your benefits are proportional to what you paid into it. Social Security is definitely not "wealth distribution." It is an income tax. It's income distribution if anything, but that's still pretty ghoulish framing for a stipend for retired folks that barely keeps them out of poverty.
> I've seen estimates that in the most progressive states, welfare benefits can amount to as much as $42,000 a year for a small family.
No citations, just some half-remembered statistic from a right-wing propaganda outlet that conveniently adds up to the weed number. Very believable. Very representative of the average person's lived experiences. I cannot overstate how pathetic you have to be, in order to be resentful about welfare benefits while making a tech worker's salary.
It seems like you are all over the place without addressing the fundamental point?
Is redistributive wealth policy count as democratic socialist policy or not?
>There's nothing socialist whatsoever about Social Security.... Your benefits are proportional to what you paid into it.
This simply isn't true. SS payments are not at all proportional to what you put in, with higher earners subsidizing lower. compare payouts for SS on 13k income and 130k income. What you pay in goes up by 10X and what you get back goes up by 3.5X you can play with a calculator if you want [1].
Tax on 13K income, SS benefit at retirement: $18,362/yr
Tax on 25K income, SS benefit at retirement: $24,627/yr
Tax on 50K income, SS benefit at retirement: $37,678/yr
Tax on 100k income, SS benefit at retirement: $56,505/yr
Tax on 130k income, SS benefit at retirement: $63,846/yr
I apologize. I was under the misimpression (though I should have clarified) that it required a specialized license just to deliver medicine to, say, a retirement home from a pharmacy in some states; which appears to be incorrect.
What I mean is that just about every aspect of medicine - teaching it, studying it, practicing it, research - is all very highly regulated with a lot of oversight both internally from those already licensed, and the government. Outside of things like finance or defense you'd be hard pressed to find anything more regulated.
Our liberal (as in philosophy, not institutions) ideas about freedom are very often boneheaded and unsophisticated. We are often convinced that if we abolish authority, we remove (a source of) tyranny. On the contrary, we remove a major protection against it. Remove authority, and you expose yourself to rule by power and force. In the absence of authority, power is the only remaining basis for rule. It is what rules.
You don't remedy shortcomings and failures of authority by abolishing it. Doing so only multiplies the problem.
This is just the Thomas Hobbes argument. Centralized authority is just exercise of power, there's nothing mystical about it some sort of powerful "sovereign". In this particular case the rules have been built to the benefit of a narrow few property holders at the expense of broader society, they are precisely a curtailment of freedom and an exercise of raw power.
So we shouldn't have abolished slavery, that only multiplied the problem? We should have reformed the institution of slavery instead?
For talking about boneheaded and unsophisticated ideas, this post is severely lacking in nuance. No one is suggesting anarchy, and removing a generally malfunctioning authority can be quite productive.
Freedom and a free market are virtues to be strived for, not a description of the current system in the USA.
What we have is best described as a mixed economy (like China's, just with a different mix of market and state that leans more towards market than China does), with an unhealthy dose of corporate regulatory capture.
Regardless of whether you're on team "big government" or team "free market", I'm pretty sure we're all quite dissatisfied with a big government that's largely captured and controlled via a revolving door between the powerful regulatory agencies and entrenched international corporations that have weaponized regulatory agencies as a business "moat" against competition.
Again, regardless of whether you're team "big government" or team "free market", it seems a vast majority of politically conscientious people ought to be opposed to such revolving doors, corporate capture, and money in politics in general.
It's deeply regrettable that even in a Democracy, positions of power have a tendency to attract people who are drawn to power, who seem to be some of those least inclined to wield it cautiously and responsibly.
I haven't exactly figured out a solution, but I wouldn't be opposed in a strictly conceptual sense (e.g. not agreeing to a specific implementation without considerable discussion / peer review) to restricting voting to
1. People with a stake in the future stability and strength of the whole system (land owners? people who've had children? not sure what the right mechanism here is, but the litmus test is a provably vested interest in the success of the whole system on a long time horizon)
and/or
2. People who are civically engaged enough to even be familiar with the process of government (civics test? I know in the past these have been abused to facilitate discrimination - I just have a hard time believing that our species is incapable of devising a knowledge-based litmus test that isn't being deliberately used to facilitate discrimination).
and/or
3. More mature people: Raising the age of majority in general from 18 to [21-25], including voting age. We know the prefrontal cortex plays an important role in making good, responsible decisions by weighing long term consequences, and it's not done developing until mid-late 20s. That said, it would be a politicized act to change voting age but not lawful firearm ownership age based on this concept, or vice versa. The politically neutral and principal-based solution here is to just raise the age of majority across the board to more accurately reflect our improved understanding of the nature of human brain development.
The US was founded on fighting back against being forced to act by others.
Why would making subsets of the population work and rent but not allow them a voice improve anything?
Everything you suggested would result in the current problems getting worse. Land owners don't mind the raising housing prices as long as the taxes don't impact them. Older people got theirs and are fine with policies that lead to younger generations getting screwed.
>Why would making subsets of the population work and rent but not allow them a voice improve anything?
The first litmus test needs to be in determining whether one has a vested interest in the long-term stability of the whole system.
The second litmus test is more about capability to participate in the system as intended by determining whether one even understands the system (and hence their role and responsibilities in it). I like another commenter suggesting US native-born citizens should be able to pass the same immigration test that immigrants are required to pass in order to naturalize and gain the right to vote.
What I'm not for is making sweeping changes that aren't peer-reviewed, discussed, and widely agreed upon, precisely for the reasons you outlined - the intent is not to benefit any one segment of society at the expense of another. We all have blind spots and the ability to call out eachother's blind spots (as you've done for mine) is kinda the selling point of peer review :)
As for voting restrictions I think it would be reasonable to restrict national voting people that can pass the same naturalization test that immigrants seeking citizenship do. I would implement it as part of high school civics courses. Every kid raised in the US should have no issue passing the English and civics tests required of immigrants. Unfortunately, with the decline of civics courses in public schools I suspect there are large number of people today that would fail to pass a basic citizenship test.
I sure hope we can engineer that test to keep the undesirables from voting. We should also work to ensure that we don't let them start learning our test materials at school.
If you want to vote, you have to be a citizen. We require immigrants seeking citizenship to pass a civics test to participate in government. Yet, we don't hold those born as citizens to the same standard. That practice is based in an understanding that a person born here would be raised holding the ideals of the country. That is no longer a given.
Now be the devil's advocate against the argument you just made - argue the case that we can achieve this without deliberately facilitating discrimination.
The age of majority should be increased, but the rest of your suggestions would be gamed. Requiring landownership was a thing was once, and not a good thing.
I believe age 18 came about because of the Vietnam War draft. Old enough to die; old enough to vote & drink. Something to consider.
The tax system is a problem also. There's an agency issue; it all about getting someone else to pay more taxes. Don't want to open that can of worms now.
>Requiring landownership was a thing was once, and not a good thing.
Landownership, by proxy, also used to mean "white male". I'm 100% opposed to race-based and sex-based litmus tests like that, but I:
A. Remain unconvinced that, conceptually, the landownership aspect by itself (in a vacuum, devoid of the race and sex overtones), was a bad thing - land owners have a vested interest in the health of the political system that influences the value of their land in a way that renters simply do not. This isn't a diss against renters (I am one), and the reasons so many people are relegated to renting are a long list of problems of their own.
B. Firmly believe we can design such vested-interest litmus tests that do not facilitate discrimination of any protected classes.
I also firmly believe 18 year olds shouldn't be dying in pointless imperial crusades, regardless of whether they're in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, or Ukraine. Most 18 year olds of today (at least in the US) are very much so still kids in many ways. No more dead kids.
Your consideration suggestion is noted but slices both ways. Not old enough to drink or own a handgun? Not old enough to drive or die in pointless wars.
It's exactly because of your point 1 (those with a stake in the future of the system) that I'm somewhat in favour of lowering the voting age, and making voting non- compulsory (I'm in Australia) for those over retirement age.
I haven't observed any evidence that people vote more sensibly at 21 vs 18 at any rate. But there's strong evidence that those over 50 or 60 vote to preserve the status quo even when it's clearly not working well for all sorts of rational and less-than-rational reasons. And yes you did mention stability too, which is important in the long run obviously, but not always best maintained just by avoiding intentional radical change at all costs.
Why don’t we try removing all the insane tax incentives first, e.g. 1031 exchange, and then see what happens? There are so many incentives for investment in real estate. Even if more housing was built, investors would snap up the properties and keep prices high. I don’t understand how you can complain about high prices while investor demand is massively subsidized.
Tax incentives for property investing are ridiculous in many countries. In Canada, the capital gains on the sale of your primary residence are tax-free. You just have to live there for about a year. People move annually, flipping as they go, to earn a tax free income while someone investing in the stock market is taxed. It makes no sense to me.
The U.S. has the same tax incentive, but there is an additional tax incentive, called a 1031 exchange, that lets you pay no capital gains if you invest the money in more real estate.
Without these incentives housing supply would be even lower. The incentives are designed to encourage the creation of additional housing units. Without liquidity in the space new housing creation would stagnate.
I think one underdiscussed reason is transportation. Basically people have a certain commute tolerance, and so the better transportation infrastructure, the further out (where land is cheap) you can build.
The Atlanta metro area doesn't have any zoning regulation? That's the first I've heard of it. Cool.
So, what would housing prices be if Atlanta did have restrictions? The research says higher. But, it's hard to show that with any rigor since what would you compare Atlanta with? Every city is different and it's a challenge to get a good comparison.
Atlanta has minimal regs compared to other very large cities. The code enforcement here is about as minimal as it gets, and (back when I did construction) there was certainly no proactive enforcement like I've heard friends complain about in places like LA - it was very reactive. I can't imagine it's changed that much.
It hasn't caught up yet. This phenomenon is only a few years old, and Atlanta hasn't been seen as the "escape city" quite like Austin, Charlotte, or Nashville.
It’s been growing consistently for like the past decade. Builders gotta build and they’re definitely working at it! It just takes time and demand has increased very quickly.
Same thing in Houston, which is essentially a zoning-free city.
Going after regulations is a red herring: the real problem is the investor class snapping up the housing supply.
I bought a townhome last year at the height of the market in a great and competitive neighborhood, paid a very reasonable price and faced zero counter offers. Why? My HOA agreement has provisions that prevent the owner from using the property as a short-term rental. Contrast that to single family homes that were going hundreds above asking price and with cash offers. As soon as you remove the incentive to purchase a home purely as an investment, the experience improves dramatically for buyers looking for a place to live.
The weird thing is Houston has this reputation without even building that much housing. They build about the same amount per capita as Dallas or San Antonio, but Austin builds way more and that has been true for 30 years.
> the real problem is the investor class snapping up the housing supply.
I don’t understand why this narrative keeps popping up. Institutions own a very small percentage of homes in the US. They much prefer to own apartments, which is the most effective way of increasing the available shelter.
I understand that it’s convenient to blame the wealthy… but don’t you think homes are expensive because of 0% interest rates over the last decade?!
A recent real estate thread detailing the decline of Airbnb revenues (avg yoy revenue is down by almost 50% in cities like Austin and Phoenix) puts things into perspective.
For example, there are 10x as many active AirBnb rentals in Sevierville, TN (a popular mountain tourism spot) as there are homes on the market. The overall percentage of home ownership by investors might be small, but they represent a large percentage of real estate transactions taking place today.
Buying a house today largely means being able to outbid people with millions of dollars in cash and real estate at their disposal, you will see this firsthand if you ever try to buy a home in a competitive area.
> Buying a house today largely means being able to outbid people with millions of dollars in cash and real estate at their disposal, you will see this firsthand if you ever try to buy a home in a competitive area.
In my experience this is certainly true with any large land plot, which can easily be subdivided into smaller plots with houses.
I’m not against municipalities placing restrictions on airbnbs. The reality is that they never end up doing that. That tiny mountain spot you mentioned probably LOVES all the tourism revenue.
Also I don’t really understand your point…a small TN mountain town who thrives off tourism is SO far away from the shelter needs of 99.99% of Americans.
Investors impact the market to some extent…but the insane monetary policy of 0% rates and 5 rounds of QE is EASILY the biggest factor. It’s not even close.
EDIT: lol at your last comment. I bought a brand new house in midtown Atlanta 2021.
You both are correct from what I can tell. The HOA-less areas properties in my area are going quickly, anything larger than 5 acres is going quickly, etc. But to your point near-zero interest rates cause demand to rise which also puts upward pressure on price.
> Same thing in Houston, which is essentially a zoning-free city.
While there may not be 'traditional' zoning, there seem to be a bunch of regulations:
> There are a number of reasons this line of questioning is a mistake, but the most fundamental one is that people misunderstand what “no zoning” means in the Houston context. If land use in Houston were genuinely unregulated, then this Nancy Sarnoff article[1] about possible revisions to Houston land use rules would make no sense. In fact, the city features extensive regulation of minimum lot size and maximum parking requirements just like every other major American city.
> What are the real-life impacts? When the rental property developers press in, people can petition for their areas to be classified as historic. In effect, people are using [historic] district-making in place of zoning to push back against change.
> This buffering ordinance is the latest edition in the city’s history of enacting land-use regulations without using the word “zoning.” Urban planners and scholars have long debated whether Houston has zoning codes that are clad in terms like “buffering.” The reality is that Houston has created a host of regulations that govern what can be built where.
So there is a large supply of high density housing?
If housing prices are going up and higher density housing isn't going up then you have regulation blocking it.
After all if people are willing to pay a $2,000 mortgage for a home you can put 4 apartments in that space and trivially get $1,000 rent for each.
Note that doesn't scale down much and so lower cost of living places not going high density makes sense.
In either case a normal sized house in Southern California isn't worth over a million dollars because of material costs and only indirectly due to regulation. The core reason is always demand outstrips supply.
OP is saying "you can't have a balance if you restrict the supply".
Sure. It's desirable. What wouldn't cost if it weren't dense? For example, what do you think a single family house with an acre of land would cost within walking distance of Central Park and the Public Library? A bit more than the same house on a rural road 2 hours from that spot. It's all about location and desirability. People can afford an apartment since you can fit a lot more of them in that acre, but few people can afford that house.
Irrelevant when discussing price changes due to drastic increase in supply of urban housing.
330M people in the USA, let’s say NYC’s public transit/urban environment serves 4M of its people.
20 NYC like cities means 76M more people’s desire to live in a NYC like environment can be satisfied.
Surely once you start getting into the tens of millions range, the supply gets closer to meeting demand, if not exceeding it, and prices drop. There are only so many people, after all.
A 10 lane highway can easily be saturated by tens of thousands of people in a small window of time. A 100k lane highway would be a better comparison.
NYC is an excellent case of restrictive zoning driving housing prices. A shocking number of pre-war apartment buildings in Manhattan would be illegal to build today. Not just for changes in fire escape design, but also the basic shape and height of the building. Despite being illegal designs these buildings remain highly desirable and command high prices, indicating there is a large gap between what the market wants from housing in NYC and what is permitted.
NYC doesn't have uniform extreme density, with places in Queens and Staten Island having large swaths of single family homes. The popularity of NYC should mean the city is getting even more dense, but the restrictive zoning means units are being added at a much lower rate than demand. Of course prices are going to rise.
Would zoning not just be another thing that when filtered through our Gilded Age II corruption will lead to an unfair market?
If I was a big developer in cahoots with a local government, wouldn't I seek to influence zoning laws to impede my competitors and harm consumers by inflating prices?
This feels like another one of those things that looks inherently bad until you realize with governance and a culture of anti corruption, it might actually work great.
Immigration? Really? You think people escaping their destabilized homelands are going to be able to put a down payment, let alone get the credit, or even have the history to get a mortgage?
There’s other reasons for demand side being the cause but immigration has got to be pretty far down on that list.
Unless these people are living in tents, they will need houses. They may not be buying their own place, but they will need housing somewhere, probably in houses purchased by councils or private landlords.
Also, not all immigration is from destabilised homelands. For instance, the people taking up H1B visas or similar.
Well, where i live they sure can’t do that, but they can get subsidized for paying rent. Not have only that, but they can sub rent, and still receive tax payer money.
There was a recent case of a fire in a T2 apartment. 12 immigrant were living in that single apartment. Similar situations are being reported in every city in this small country.
This means you can rent apartment you have, and there’s always immigrants looking for it, that can share/subrent with an absurd amount of people, each get their check and so your apartment rent is fully paid paid by social security.
More factors, deportations almost don’t happen, government is facilitating immigration.
This all adds up when you notice that the government figureheads were all previously mayors, and traditionally corruption at the mayor level was paid with real estate. So they are just using social security funds to charge absurd rents, and keep pressure on raising price.
Guess what happens when rent is high? House prices are also high.
But don’t worry, government is helping everyone with their payments by sending checks to everyone paying rent or house loan.
I'm surprised no one in this thread is talking about urbanization. I guess the trend has slowed little bit in recent years from it's breakneck speed, but by and large people are still shifting from rural to urban on the average and that effects the housing supply in the majority of desirable cities. Certainly moreso than immigrants, lol.
If you have an argument for why supply and demand doesn't apply to housing, I'm here for it.
And I say this as someone with a large house that's nearly doubled in value since I bought it with only 5 or 6 years left on their mortgage. Personally high house prices benefit me.
Unless all the immigrants live in the fields and in the woods, they increase housing demand, likely on the lower end if they are as poor as you describe, and push the whole market up.
If you look at Canada (especially southern Ontario) you'll see a large correlation between incoming international students rates and property prices (first in Toronto, then across the region). See especially the trends in 2015.
Canada's population rose by one million people in 2022:
We did not build one million housing units (even taking into account things like families of four, students having room mates, and various other forms of 'household').
That's a pretty small percentage of total immigration surely?
All things considered it's reasonable to assume too-high an immigration rate will put upwards pressure on housing prices. If that means we need temporary restrictions on where recent immigrants are allowed to purchase homes I don't see an issue - I certainly don't believe it would be fair for me to move to the US and immediately be able to buy a house wherever I like, helping price out those who have their whole lives rooted there already.
Why doesn't anyone mention real estate agents/agencies when talking about housing prices? When I bought my first home in the early 90s it seemed like a confidence game back then and it's only gotten worse since. What I'm basically talking about is everyone in the business of selling homes, including "your" agent gaslighting you into thinking that home prices will always go up. "You should by this now. You can't lose money. This is a great investment." In recent years it's been "You should offer 20% over asking." It used to make some sense that prices would generally go up for well built/maintained homes in good neighborhoods but that nod to sanity went out the door when AirBnB came along.
Pick a better agent and stand your ground. You're making arguably the biggest decision/purchase of your life (along with who to marry and whether to have kids or not). Don't let some schmuck with a bunch of fake trophies who you've met 1 hour ago have ANY control over your offers. They advise only, and handle the paperwork, period.
RE agents have 0 power over you when Zillow and Redfin have 99% of the same data that the agents have.
Like it or not, agents serve an important role in real estate transactions by helping guide homebuyers through an incredibly complicated process. And it’s totally possible to be your own buying agent and save money if you’re willing to put in the work.
“You should offer 20% above asking” is the agent giving you advice on how to win the deal, and a good agent will know when offer above or when to come in slightly under and see how open the seller is to negotiating. The agent doesn’t get paid until you buy the property, so they’re motivated to put you in the best position to buy.
> And it’s totally possible to be your own buying agent and save money if you’re willing to put in the work.
This is rarely true. The seller has negotiated and agreed to a commission with their agent, and that is getting paid regardless of whether the buyer is represented or not. Perhaps you can negotiate a purchase price low enough that the seller's agent fee is the seller's problem, but only in a buyer's market (which currently does not exist in any major market I'm aware of). The only time it makes sense to not use an agent is if you're confident you can market and close a transaction yourself selling your own property.
It's really unfortunate that there is a 3-6% drag on real estate transactions from agent and brokerage commissions, but various attempts to disrupt this model and drive down the cost have not been successful.
A friend of mine just represented himself in a transaction in a hot market. Typically, the seller cuts 6% which gets split between the buying agent and selling agent. What he did was negotiate that down to 3% to the selling agent and knock another 2% off of the final price.
> It’s really unfortunate that there is a 3-6% drag on real estate transactions
That’s because dealing with real estate is very difficult and tedious, as we’ve seen companies try and fail to disrupt this system.
I did something similar when I bought my place. Negotiated the 2.5% buyers fee to go towards closing cost. Paid for all the closing costs and my mortgage guy baked in like 4 months worth of property taxes into it to soak it all up.
This was not my experience. Our agent walked us through the assumptions under which buying a home would make financial sense (e.g. years in home, projected rate of increase in home prices, etc) and he made it absolutely clear we could lose money depending on timing. Ultimately we decided to buy because we believe LA is a market where demand will outstrip supply for the foreseeable future (and prop 13 while not great policy for society will personally benefit us).
Agents want to close a sale. Typically, that is aligned with the interests of buyers and sellers.
We've found that agents are most useful when we're driving them towards the outcome that _we_ want. That means two things:
* When possible, do our own market research. Form an opinion then compare that to the agent's opinion.
* Ask questions like "what do you typically see", "how have other people handled X", etc, etc. Instead of having your agent simply tell you what to do, leverage their knowledge to inform your opinion.
-----
With that being said, I've interacted seem to think they can magically make a house worth more than the market values it.
Agents have no duty to be honest, do non anecdotal research. they have every incentive to get a client and close a deal (at the highest price that will close)
Yes, the simplicity of agent incentives is what make them so easy and useful to work with.
They are not finical advisors or investment experts. They simply find a price that will close a deal, and ensure that it closes swiftly. If you want that, perfect.
A good agent will tell you what bid would likely win.
There are checks and balances built in. For example, if you offer too much money, and the appraisal comes back and says it's not worth that much money, then your loan will not cover it and you will be on the hook to cover the difference.
Only in instances of fraud, at least effectively. Appraisals defer heavily to "this person is willing to pay $X to this unrelated person for this exact house".
If they can find someone paying more for a nicer house and someone paying less for a worse house you are likely going to be in the clear.
Technically they are supposed to adjust to get your home value from comparables but the magic "market adjustment" means that they can basically always do that.
So they take 6%. That doesn't explain why the price is persistently high in many regions. Do you think stocks would be higher if brokers took a 6% commission?
If you look the regions with the highest prices often have geographical and political barriers to build more supply. NYC, LA, SF, MI and Seattle.
I think you literally proved his point. It’s because capitalism that developers only build profitable properties. They will not build anything that devalues their own portfolio. That’s just capitalism for you.
I did not say 'capitalism evil'. It has its strong and weak points.
It is just that enlisting everything and everyone on the planet into a pure financial model that can be leveraged for rents and speculaion is what it is about.
Real estate is investment and no one ever wants their investments to devalue. And the only way to slow stop or even decrease housing is to devalue it by building beyond what’s needed. No investor will ever do that.
It is capitalism in its purest form. And no kind of free market will fix this issue.
Anytime you think you have a simple explanation for a complex problem it should raise red flags in your head.
Developers absolutely want to build and sell as many homes as possible.
Private enterprise is literally what created all the shelter in the first place. Who else is gonna build shelter? It definitely isn’t gonna be the government…
That’s part of the problem. The bigger problem is that housing is an investment vehicle, and so the incentive is only for increasing property values which, one component is limited supply. Maybe it’s cause of land use regulations and maybe it’s because investors do not want to devalue their portfolio.
It is often interesting for me to read HN when these topics come-up because you can see lack of life and business experience in the comments. In some cases you can also see the great job our schools are doing indoctrinating people with bullshit.
This thread does not disappoint.
Someone mentioned supply and demand and was summarily put down. And yet, that's at the top of the list in every city in the world.
Built in 2022, 4 bedrooms, 3 bathrooms, 2,137 square feet.
$379,000
Of course, some of the price reflects quality of build, finish and materials. However, at a baseline, these homes are comparable.
Why does the first cost nearly three times the cost of the second and 4.4x that of the third?
When all the smoke and bullshit clears out, the answer is brutally simple:
- People are not willing to pay the same price
for a similar house in different locations
- Less homes are available where people want to live
- People bid-up prices in an effort to buy homes
where they want to live
No, zoning laws are not the main drivers.
Why?
You can't double or triple the number of homes in the first neighborhood presented. It is physically and logistically impossible. The area cannot support such a move.
Someone might say: Sure you can! Buy all the homes and build apartment buildings.
Sure, in fantasy land anything is possible. Just the lawsuits from neighboring communities due to the destruction of property values, increased traffic, etc. will take 50 years to resolve. If we leave fantasy-land, this is simply impossible. The power, water an sewer system in that neighborhood might not be able to support expansion.
The point is, there's a difference between fantasy and reality.
The more expensive homes don't necessarily cost more due to higher construction costs. Although, yes, it does cost more to build in some of these neighborhoods because there is a minimum expectation of quality of materials, fit and finish.
For example, in that neighborhood, most homes have smooth flat walls without texture applied. This might not make sense to non-US reader, sorry. Spray texture is used on drywall to hide and mask imperfections. This allows for more relaxed finish requirements, massively reducing labor and all other costs. A smooth wall without texture is what's called a "Level 5" wall and so...
Bull fucking shit. The only fantasy land here is the one where we can’t build because it’s just too hard. Cities densifying is literally what cities have been doing for thousands of years now. It’s not impossible, and it’s not even hard. Yes, you have to invest in sewers, electrical infrastructure, schools, etc. but that is not hard either. We literally do it all the fucking time. Was Manhattan master planned for 3 million people back when it was New Amsterdam? No fucking way. Current system can’t be expanded? Build a new one. JFC, this isn’t rocket science.
Scaling cities is asymptotic. You get to a point beyond which it is --outside of fantasy land-- as close to impossible as you are going to get.
Brother, we can't even build a fucking high speed train in California and you are talking about ripping-up cities to increase density.
We can't generate enough power to support the electrification of transportation, and you are saying things like "it's not even hard".
Have you ever built anything? I have. Multiple times. Let me tell you, it isn't easy. It's hard, very hard. And it easily goes exponentially expensive. Case in point, the California High Speed train --again.
The other issue often ignored in fantasy-land is this virtual-reality mentality that you can click and mouse and rebuild entire cities and neighborhoods. Well, reality isn't a video game. Things don't work that way. The relative cost of any construction today has reached astronomical levels. There isn't enough revenue to take a city of non-trivial scale and, say, double the infrastructure. Like I said, things are asymptotic. I know that's hard to understand when looking at reality as if it were a video game fantasy. Well, it isn't. Sorry.
No, what you are thinking is firmly planted in fantasy land. You might not realize it now. Give it a few decades and more experience and you might understand.
Why do I say "more experience"? Because nobody --nobody-- who truly understands construction would say the things you are saying. Only those observing from the outside think this way.
Go try to build something in a city like Los Angeles and see how much fun it is. And by that I mean, something where you need new sewers, electricity, water, roads, schools.
In my town they built a new high school at a completely new location (vacant lot, unused land, etc.).
It took THIRTHY FIVE YEARS. And they still made a mess of it. And you think densifying a city is "not even hard"? Please.
My neighborhood went from 3000 people per square mile to over 20000 in less than a decade. Did traffic get worse? Slightly…but mobility actually improved because we built light rail. It now takes less time to move around the city. Did we have to build a new sewer processing facility? Yes. And it costs me all of $15 a month to pay for it. Did we have to build a new electrical substation? Of course! And we did it in less than a year without any problems.
I have more than enough experience to know it can be done. I’m living that experience every day. I’m sorry you’re so bad at building things that you think it’s not possible, but luckily we’re not all incompetent.
That’s very funny. It’s funny that you think that’s impressive. It’s funny that you think density means anything. It’s funny that you think you actually have experience because others did the work. It’s funny that you think your lame 10x density increase can actually translate to a city like Los Angeles, NYC, San Francisco, etc. It’s funny you can’t connect reality to math and understand what you are talking about is pure fantasy:
NYC 20MM today, 200MM after your fantasy
Los Angeles, 12MM to 120MM
Chicago, 9MM to 90MM
Etc.
Please. Get real.
Now, if you are talking about building where there’s nothing (3000 people per square mile is nothing), well, have at it. That’s not where housing availability is a problem.
Oh, yes, your attempt to use density to impress is hilarious. I did note you said “your neighborhood”. One or a few apartment buildings can easily cause a 10x density increase in a neighborhood, given that “neighborhood” can be just a few blocks.
If you actually want to make the point you are attempting to make, provide links to the many stories that would have been written about a non-trivial CITY increasing the population by a factor of ten within its own boundaries. Otherwise, I think you are trying to inflate two apartment buildings into something they are not.
This is about providing affordable housing for tens of millions of people. That cannot be done within the boundaries of major cities in the US. That problem is asymptotic.
This happened in Seattle, which I assume falls into your non-trivial CITY argument. Nobody here is talking about making Manhattan or Downtown Chicago denser, JFC. They’re talking about making SFH neighborhoods denser…you know, those neighborhoods like the ones where you find those million dollar homes that you linked to in your post.
I’m so glad I don’t work with anybody like you. What a fucking nightmare.
My observation is that homeowners tend to be more involved in local government, and have a personal incentive for their homes / land to increase in value. For most, homes are thier single largest investment. Intentionally or not, they use the force of government to insure / inflate the value of their property
There’s nothing invisible about this. We talk about it all the time in literally every discussion about primary causes of high house prices, right up there with stupidly low interest rates for way too long. Unlike interest rates which can be easily changed, restrictive zoning is primarily a Boomer NIMBY problem, pulling up the ladder behind themselves.
If you start viewing high and increasing housing prices as a feature of the system, and not a bug, much of the world that seems illogical starts to appear logical.
For example, "Why do the powers that be continue to restrict land use? Don't they know that it drives up housing prices?"
Instead: "Because high and stable housing prices are desirable for society as a whole, restrictions on land use are put in place in order to carefully limit the amount of supply in the system. The people, voters and institutions doing this are not stupid or malicious, but know exactly what they are doing, and do it quite well."
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 234 ms ] threadI've heard this touted as the reason for a housing shortage for as long as I can remember.
However, by the time an area has become popular, restricting development will only hurt rent affordability. I guess some would like to prevent their neighborhoods from becoming popular in the first place though.
A community can improve on average while some people see less of that benefit.
*(That is, however far you're convinced that there even is a market; for rent, thanks to "discounts" that allow property owners to avoid actually advertising lower rates, supply and demand don't exist, only the imperative to raise rates annually.)
The problem is not that there isn't enough housing in any one particular area. There are a lot of issues with the argument that everyone everywhere just needs to build as much as possible, no matter what, and it's disingenuous to any such argument as NIMBYism.
The problem is that there aren't enough nice places that are actually comfortable to live: good access to transit, access to green spaces, not too much traffic, access to shopping and grocery stores, etc. This is broadly because of how American cities and towns are designed.
Only per unit not per square meter.
I also have two daughters who are young adults and still living at home because they can't afford rent. So even for that reason alone I REALLY don't want expensive housing prices.
You’re already profiting simply by having a higher net worth.
The benefit comes from gains being definitively accumulated by percentage. When your owned amount is higher, equal percent gain is greater absolute gain.
> Gains are locked into a property until sold or mortgaged.
This is essentially the equivalent of "Gains are locked into money until spent on goods or services." True. But gains are gains and worth is worth regardless of how many seconds or minutes it takes to spend. The only difference is immediate urgency of conversion within a very narrow time window (it does not take that long to get a mortgage on an owned property that is now worth X percent more than it was yesteryear).
Maybe "profit" was a poor choice of words. But this has turned into an utterly meaningless semantic argument that has nothing to do with the point I was trying to make.
No, they're saying the price of the house is irrelevant. If they bought both houses for $250k, say they're now worth $750k, they're a millionaire and got a million dollars of profit!
Their point is they need two houses for their family and will until they die. If they have two houses still worth $250k or two houses worth $750k it doesn't matter to their quality of life.
If having more money available to you through conversion doesn't have a direct and measurable impact on your quality of life, that's exclusively because of decisions you make about what to do with it. Assets don't follow you into the afterlife, so, bare minimum, when you get old you can sell it and rent or put a mortgage on it and have a much bigger pile of cash to spend until you die than the person with the less valuable house would.
Or, if you have children and are into such things, you can engage in massive generational wealth transfer and make it so they never have to work a day in their lives to cover rent. There are a lot of people out there who don't get to experience such a wondrous bounty that they didn't do anything to earn but which is an extremely relevant benefit with extremely measurable impacts on quality of life nonetheless.
The benefit is having that option.
There's something about money that brings out the worst in people, whether that be malice or simply stupidity.
However, home prices are, many times, also a reflection of the local economy and the earning and/or spending power of the locals (or tourists). And usually, higher earning/spending power is better than lower earning/spending power.
You just have to ensure you are in position to grab a portion of that economic activity, which is a better situation to be in than trying to grab a portion of no or little economic activity in a struggling region.
As an aside, my property has approximately doubled (in Zillow guesstimate and in assessed value) since we bought it in 2007. Our property taxes over that time went from around $8K to around $12K. An inflation calculator over that period would say that $8K in 2007 is worth $11.7K today, suggesting that property taxes track general inflation much more closely than they follow property values.
So, my property has doubled in nominal value, representing a 36% increase in real dollars, while my property taxes have gone up by only 3% in real terms.
Edit to add: inflation of course massively helps mortgage borrowers. If I bought my house for 100 units of currency, borrowing 80 and the currency change worth such that it now takes 147 units of currency to buy the house (just from inflation effects), then I still owe only the original 80 units of the now less valuable currency (minus principal repaid in the meantime). Inflation just paid off over 30% of my mortgage for me.
Correct, but that is because the current politics are all about shifting the burden to future generations, and one of those ways is vis drastic subsidies to land owners from non land owners via undeservedly low land value taxes.
Perhaps my claim of 1 to 1 relationship between property (land value) tax and land/house price is too strong, but at some point, it will have to go higher and catch up.
This is the reason that "you need housing so why would you want house prices to go up" -> some large fraction of homeowners are levered up to their eyeballs
"Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"
There is a method actually though. Voters of the state can vote for state laws that affect all cities, and voters of the nation can vote for national law repesentives that affect all cities.
And it ultimately seems like politicians have more to fear from the immediate prospect of losing votes from NIMBY constituents than the potential gain of future votes years down the line from grateful new residents.
Specifically, when do they vote and on what do they vote? If you dig into this you eventually end up with the premise of the article.
In a past life I wanted to build dense housing. i.e. more units per square meter. I went to buy land, and at the same time started going through the bureaucratic process of getting things approved by the government so that I could start building.
I have the necessary know-how to build what I wanted with my own resources, I was willing to apply for all permits necessary. However, I got turned down flat by the government. The only thing I was allowed to build on this land was ONE house. The land could have fit 15+ houses or an apartment building with dozens of units, but no, the city zoning board had decreed that this land was zoned ONLY to single family housing. So the only thing that could be built on this site was one single family house. Guess who the members of the zoning board were that turned me down? Local homeowners, who did not want to see the character of their neighborhood change.
This is the root of the problem. The free market is not allowed to function, because of this process.
And the thing is: this same process exists in every metro area in the US. Zoning boards populated by local homeowners with no desire to change anything.
The economic incentives already exist for denser, more affordable, housing; but developers are not allowed to build anything other than what the land has been zoned for. The people in charge of that zoning have the opposite incentive, they want their beautiful, low-density, neighborhood to never change.
Sellers, agents, and banks all want you to pay as much as possible. Want a loan? "What is your monthly income? We'll figure out how much you qualify for." You might be able to resist these forces, but most people can't, and they set the market rates.
Funny how that works.
Here is (IME) one of the more common blind spots when discussing housing prices (specifically rents): price fixing by corporate-run algorithmic cartels: https://www.propublica.org/article/yieldstar-rent-increase-r...
The more you tax, say, cars, the fewer youll get and vice versa.
The more land is taxed, the more becomes available and vice versa.
Land isnt taxed and the main proxy for land tax (property taxes) are at historic lows.
> One of the algorithm’s developers told ProPublica that leasing agents had “too much empathy” compared to computer generated pricing.
The article also has multiple anecdotes that run counter to your own. Just because you saw rents drop in response to demand decline doesn't mean this is what happens in practice most of the time.
> For tenants, the system upends the practice of negotiating with apartment building staff. RealPage discourages bargaining with renters and has even recommended that landlords in some cases accept a lower occupancy rate in order to raise rents and make more money.
> Hutchinson, who is an analyst for the police department, wondered if a computer algorithm was behind building staff’s inflexibility. “It was pretty obvious they should have been dropping prices,” she said. “They were digging their heels in.”
Please remember: this isn't some economics game like the price of cars or eggs. Housing is something you need TO LIVE and for which there is NO SUBSTITUTE. Increasing supply will only go so far, as long as your society allows it to be controlled by entities that see is it as a profit maximization game, you will see horrific outcomes.
That is all that matters. Get vacancy rates above 10% and maybe then we’ll talk about dynamic pricing boogiemen.
Is it fair to call the US a capitalist country? Honestly, I don't think so. It's a weird disastrous mishmash of socialism, capitalism, and English bureaucracy. It's just "more capitalist" than other countries who at least have the intellectual honesty to more fully commit to a system.
We have some very limited vestiges of social democracy, but social democracy is not socialism. Socialists and social democrats were not allies. Google the meme: “SocDems killed Rosa.”
What you’re observing is what unregulated capitalism will always devolve into. It goes by many names: capitalism, crony capitalism, neoliberalism, corporatism, oligarchy, fascism. But the idea is the same. Labor is violently oppressed. The State only serves the interests of capitalists. The State and Capital are often indistinguishable. There is no competition. There are structural barriers that stifle small businesses and enrich rent seeking trusts. It’s a new Gilded Age, brought to life by a new Lochner era for the Supreme Court.
I have good news and bad news: this system, whatever you call it, is extremely unstable. Its collapse is inevitable, well within the span of a single human lifetime.
Except for the half of the entire federal budget that is spent strictly on wealth redistribution to enhance equity between the rich and the poor - Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid. Seriously, these three programs are fully half of all federal spending.
Not to mention all the state wealth redistribution programs, that cover housing (section 8), food (food stamps), education (public school system for k-12, pell grants above), utilities (utility vouchers), healthcare (ACA), telecom ("obamaphones", broadband vouchers), and more.
I've seen estimates that in the most progressive states, welfare benefits can amount to as much as $42,000 a year for a small family.
You can argue that on a PPP & CoL basis, that isn't much money in e.g. Bay Area (where that is well below poverty level), but that's also a global top 10% income.
To say there is "nothing" socialist about the US is disingenuous, politicized, and pedantic at best. There is substantial social wealth redistribution and there exist substantial worker protections in the USA. You can find plenty of countries with a FAR less socialist nature. In fairness, it is likewise hyperbolic to describe the USA as a communist or even "fully" socialist country.
We also spend about a sixth on interest payments.
Everything else the entire federal government does combined is only about one sixth the federal budget.
The UK NHS is a socialized healthcare system. The profit motive is not allowed to corrupt any part of the system. Pharmaceutical prices are strictly controlled (none of this $26k/year Alzheimer's drug nonsense). It is fully nationalized. Nationalizing an entire industry in peacetime is often (but not always) associated with socialism.
Even Canada's single payer system is not socialist in any sense of the word. It's just a government-run insurance plan. There are many multi-payer insurance systems in the world that perform far better than ours. Single-payer is not a panacea without price controls. Price controls are somewhat socialist. Funnily enough, the last US president to enact price controls was Richard Nixon, known friend of Marxists across the globe /s.
There's nothing socialist whatsoever about Social Security. It does not redistribute wealth. The tax is infamously capped at the first ~$130k of income you make per year. Any income above the cap is untaxed by Social Security. Your benefits are proportional to what you paid into it. Social Security is definitely not "wealth distribution." It is an income tax. It's income distribution if anything, but that's still pretty ghoulish framing for a stipend for retired folks that barely keeps them out of poverty.
> I've seen estimates that in the most progressive states, welfare benefits can amount to as much as $42,000 a year for a small family.
No citations, just some half-remembered statistic from a right-wing propaganda outlet that conveniently adds up to the weed number. Very believable. Very representative of the average person's lived experiences. I cannot overstate how pathetic you have to be, in order to be resentful about welfare benefits while making a tech worker's salary.
Is redistributive wealth policy count as democratic socialist policy or not?
>There's nothing socialist whatsoever about Social Security.... Your benefits are proportional to what you paid into it.
This simply isn't true. SS payments are not at all proportional to what you put in, with higher earners subsidizing lower. compare payouts for SS on 13k income and 130k income. What you pay in goes up by 10X and what you get back goes up by 3.5X you can play with a calculator if you want [1].
Tax on 13K income, SS benefit at retirement: $18,362/yr
Tax on 25K income, SS benefit at retirement: $24,627/yr
Tax on 50K income, SS benefit at retirement: $37,678/yr
Tax on 100k income, SS benefit at retirement: $56,505/yr
Tax on 130k income, SS benefit at retirement: $63,846/yr
https://smartasset.com/retirement/social-security-calculator...
You don't remedy shortcomings and failures of authority by abolishing it. Doing so only multiplies the problem.
For talking about boneheaded and unsophisticated ideas, this post is severely lacking in nuance. No one is suggesting anarchy, and removing a generally malfunctioning authority can be quite productive.
What we have is best described as a mixed economy (like China's, just with a different mix of market and state that leans more towards market than China does), with an unhealthy dose of corporate regulatory capture.
Regardless of whether you're on team "big government" or team "free market", I'm pretty sure we're all quite dissatisfied with a big government that's largely captured and controlled via a revolving door between the powerful regulatory agencies and entrenched international corporations that have weaponized regulatory agencies as a business "moat" against competition.
Again, regardless of whether you're team "big government" or team "free market", it seems a vast majority of politically conscientious people ought to be opposed to such revolving doors, corporate capture, and money in politics in general.
It's deeply regrettable that even in a Democracy, positions of power have a tendency to attract people who are drawn to power, who seem to be some of those least inclined to wield it cautiously and responsibly.
I haven't exactly figured out a solution, but I wouldn't be opposed in a strictly conceptual sense (e.g. not agreeing to a specific implementation without considerable discussion / peer review) to restricting voting to
1. People with a stake in the future stability and strength of the whole system (land owners? people who've had children? not sure what the right mechanism here is, but the litmus test is a provably vested interest in the success of the whole system on a long time horizon)
and/or
2. People who are civically engaged enough to even be familiar with the process of government (civics test? I know in the past these have been abused to facilitate discrimination - I just have a hard time believing that our species is incapable of devising a knowledge-based litmus test that isn't being deliberately used to facilitate discrimination).
and/or
3. More mature people: Raising the age of majority in general from 18 to [21-25], including voting age. We know the prefrontal cortex plays an important role in making good, responsible decisions by weighing long term consequences, and it's not done developing until mid-late 20s. That said, it would be a politicized act to change voting age but not lawful firearm ownership age based on this concept, or vice versa. The politically neutral and principal-based solution here is to just raise the age of majority across the board to more accurately reflect our improved understanding of the nature of human brain development.
Why would making subsets of the population work and rent but not allow them a voice improve anything?
Everything you suggested would result in the current problems getting worse. Land owners don't mind the raising housing prices as long as the taxes don't impact them. Older people got theirs and are fine with policies that lead to younger generations getting screwed.
The first litmus test needs to be in determining whether one has a vested interest in the long-term stability of the whole system.
The second litmus test is more about capability to participate in the system as intended by determining whether one even understands the system (and hence their role and responsibilities in it). I like another commenter suggesting US native-born citizens should be able to pass the same immigration test that immigrants are required to pass in order to naturalize and gain the right to vote.
What I'm not for is making sweeping changes that aren't peer-reviewed, discussed, and widely agreed upon, precisely for the reasons you outlined - the intent is not to benefit any one segment of society at the expense of another. We all have blind spots and the ability to call out eachother's blind spots (as you've done for mine) is kinda the selling point of peer review :)
Hell I would love to hear an example of such a restriction that wasn't beneficial to a particular part of society.
This isn't a "need better rules" thing it is a "access to voting is not our problem" thing.
I believe age 18 came about because of the Vietnam War draft. Old enough to die; old enough to vote & drink. Something to consider.
The tax system is a problem also. There's an agency issue; it all about getting someone else to pay more taxes. Don't want to open that can of worms now.
Landownership, by proxy, also used to mean "white male". I'm 100% opposed to race-based and sex-based litmus tests like that, but I:
A. Remain unconvinced that, conceptually, the landownership aspect by itself (in a vacuum, devoid of the race and sex overtones), was a bad thing - land owners have a vested interest in the health of the political system that influences the value of their land in a way that renters simply do not. This isn't a diss against renters (I am one), and the reasons so many people are relegated to renting are a long list of problems of their own.
B. Firmly believe we can design such vested-interest litmus tests that do not facilitate discrimination of any protected classes.
I also firmly believe 18 year olds shouldn't be dying in pointless imperial crusades, regardless of whether they're in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, or Ukraine. Most 18 year olds of today (at least in the US) are very much so still kids in many ways. No more dead kids.
Your consideration suggestion is noted but slices both ways. Not old enough to drink or own a handgun? Not old enough to drive or die in pointless wars.
Well somewhere along the line we changed our minds on the drinking age, which is 21 in all 50 states
Presumably from people trying to escape regulation and high material costs.
So, what would housing prices be if Atlanta did have restrictions? The research says higher. But, it's hard to show that with any rigor since what would you compare Atlanta with? Every city is different and it's a challenge to get a good comparison.
Going after regulations is a red herring: the real problem is the investor class snapping up the housing supply.
I bought a townhome last year at the height of the market in a great and competitive neighborhood, paid a very reasonable price and faced zero counter offers. Why? My HOA agreement has provisions that prevent the owner from using the property as a short-term rental. Contrast that to single family homes that were going hundreds above asking price and with cash offers. As soon as you remove the incentive to purchase a home purely as an investment, the experience improves dramatically for buyers looking for a place to live.
This is a misconception: https://kinder.rice.edu/urbanedge/forget-what-youve-heard-ho...
I don’t understand why this narrative keeps popping up. Institutions own a very small percentage of homes in the US. They much prefer to own apartments, which is the most effective way of increasing the available shelter.
I understand that it’s convenient to blame the wealthy… but don’t you think homes are expensive because of 0% interest rates over the last decade?!
For example, there are 10x as many active AirBnb rentals in Sevierville, TN (a popular mountain tourism spot) as there are homes on the market. The overall percentage of home ownership by investors might be small, but they represent a large percentage of real estate transactions taking place today.
Buying a house today largely means being able to outbid people with millions of dollars in cash and real estate at their disposal, you will see this firsthand if you ever try to buy a home in a competitive area.
In my experience this is certainly true with any large land plot, which can easily be subdivided into smaller plots with houses.
Also I don’t really understand your point…a small TN mountain town who thrives off tourism is SO far away from the shelter needs of 99.99% of Americans.
Investors impact the market to some extent…but the insane monetary policy of 0% rates and 5 rounds of QE is EASILY the biggest factor. It’s not even close.
EDIT: lol at your last comment. I bought a brand new house in midtown Atlanta 2021.
While there may not be 'traditional' zoning, there seem to be a bunch of regulations:
> There are a number of reasons this line of questioning is a mistake, but the most fundamental one is that people misunderstand what “no zoning” means in the Houston context. If land use in Houston were genuinely unregulated, then this Nancy Sarnoff article[1] about possible revisions to Houston land use rules would make no sense. In fact, the city features extensive regulation of minimum lot size and maximum parking requirements just like every other major American city.
* https://slate.com/business/2011/11/the-myth-of-zoning-free-h...
> What are the real-life impacts? When the rental property developers press in, people can petition for their areas to be classified as historic. In effect, people are using [historic] district-making in place of zoning to push back against change.
* https://www.deeds.com/articles/houston-the-zoning-free-city-...
> This buffering ordinance is the latest edition in the city’s history of enacting land-use regulations without using the word “zoning.” Urban planners and scholars have long debated whether Houston has zoning codes that are clad in terms like “buffering.” The reality is that Houston has created a host of regulations that govern what can be built where.
* https://therealdeal.com/texas/2023/03/16/dont-say-the-z-word...
If housing prices are going up and higher density housing isn't going up then you have regulation blocking it.
After all if people are willing to pay a $2,000 mortgage for a home you can put 4 apartments in that space and trivially get $1,000 rent for each.
Note that doesn't scale down much and so lower cost of living places not going high density makes sense.
In either case a normal sized house in Southern California isn't worth over a million dollars because of material costs and only indirectly due to regulation. The core reason is always demand outstrips supply.
OP is saying "you can't have a balance if you restrict the supply".
330M people in the USA, let’s say NYC’s public transit/urban environment serves 4M of its people.
20 NYC like cities means 76M more people’s desire to live in a NYC like environment can be satisfied.
Surely once you start getting into the tens of millions range, the supply gets closer to meeting demand, if not exceeding it, and prices drop. There are only so many people, after all.
A 10 lane highway can easily be saturated by tens of thousands of people in a small window of time. A 100k lane highway would be a better comparison.
NYC doesn't have uniform extreme density, with places in Queens and Staten Island having large swaths of single family homes. The popularity of NYC should mean the city is getting even more dense, but the restrictive zoning means units are being added at a much lower rate than demand. Of course prices are going to rise.
If I was a big developer in cahoots with a local government, wouldn't I seek to influence zoning laws to impede my competitors and harm consumers by inflating prices?
This feels like another one of those things that looks inherently bad until you realize with governance and a culture of anti corruption, it might actually work great.
There’s other reasons for demand side being the cause but immigration has got to be pretty far down on that list.
Also, not all immigration is from destabilised homelands. For instance, the people taking up H1B visas or similar.
There was a recent case of a fire in a T2 apartment. 12 immigrant were living in that single apartment. Similar situations are being reported in every city in this small country.
This means you can rent apartment you have, and there’s always immigrants looking for it, that can share/subrent with an absurd amount of people, each get their check and so your apartment rent is fully paid paid by social security.
More factors, deportations almost don’t happen, government is facilitating immigration.
This all adds up when you notice that the government figureheads were all previously mayors, and traditionally corruption at the mayor level was paid with real estate. So they are just using social security funds to charge absurd rents, and keep pressure on raising price.
Guess what happens when rent is high? House prices are also high.
But don’t worry, government is helping everyone with their payments by sending checks to everyone paying rent or house loan.
That was a "blame the corrupt government" post. It clearly want rents to rise. Uncontrolled immigration is just one of many "tools" it uses.
"Helping the families" policies that they have implemented only made tiktok full of videos "Move to X and receive Y$, here's how"
And I say this as someone with a large house that's nearly doubled in value since I bought it with only 5 or 6 years left on their mortgage. Personally high house prices benefit me.
If you look at Canada (especially southern Ontario) you'll see a large correlation between incoming international students rates and property prices (first in Toronto, then across the region). See especially the trends in 2015.
Canada's population rose by one million people in 2022:
* https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/canada-record-population-grow...
We did not build one million housing units (even taking into account things like families of four, students having room mates, and various other forms of 'household').
That's a pretty small percentage of total immigration surely? All things considered it's reasonable to assume too-high an immigration rate will put upwards pressure on housing prices. If that means we need temporary restrictions on where recent immigrants are allowed to purchase homes I don't see an issue - I certainly don't believe it would be fair for me to move to the US and immediately be able to buy a house wherever I like, helping price out those who have their whole lives rooted there already.
RE agents have 0 power over you when Zillow and Redfin have 99% of the same data that the agents have.
Like it or not, agents serve an important role in real estate transactions by helping guide homebuyers through an incredibly complicated process. And it’s totally possible to be your own buying agent and save money if you’re willing to put in the work.
“You should offer 20% above asking” is the agent giving you advice on how to win the deal, and a good agent will know when offer above or when to come in slightly under and see how open the seller is to negotiating. The agent doesn’t get paid until you buy the property, so they’re motivated to put you in the best position to buy.
This is rarely true. The seller has negotiated and agreed to a commission with their agent, and that is getting paid regardless of whether the buyer is represented or not. Perhaps you can negotiate a purchase price low enough that the seller's agent fee is the seller's problem, but only in a buyer's market (which currently does not exist in any major market I'm aware of). The only time it makes sense to not use an agent is if you're confident you can market and close a transaction yourself selling your own property.
It's really unfortunate that there is a 3-6% drag on real estate transactions from agent and brokerage commissions, but various attempts to disrupt this model and drive down the cost have not been successful.
> It’s really unfortunate that there is a 3-6% drag on real estate transactions
That’s because dealing with real estate is very difficult and tedious, as we’ve seen companies try and fail to disrupt this system.
We've found that agents are most useful when we're driving them towards the outcome that _we_ want. That means two things:
* When possible, do our own market research. Form an opinion then compare that to the agent's opinion.
* Ask questions like "what do you typically see", "how have other people handled X", etc, etc. Instead of having your agent simply tell you what to do, leverage their knowledge to inform your opinion.
-----
With that being said, I've interacted seem to think they can magically make a house worth more than the market values it.
Agents have no duty to be honest, do non anecdotal research. they have every incentive to get a client and close a deal (at the highest price that will close)
They are not finical advisors or investment experts. They simply find a price that will close a deal, and ensure that it closes swiftly. If you want that, perfect.
A good agent will tell you what bid would likely win.
If they can find someone paying more for a nicer house and someone paying less for a worse house you are likely going to be in the clear.
Technically they are supposed to adjust to get your home value from comparables but the magic "market adjustment" means that they can basically always do that.
If you look the regions with the highest prices often have geographical and political barriers to build more supply. NYC, LA, SF, MI and Seattle.
Not Dallas, Austin, Chicago etc.
This is capitalism in its purest form.
Capitalism is the only reason developers create shelter in the first place…
Why aren’t you and GP out there building houses for a loss? None of the people complaining about capitalism ever actually practice their own ideals.
Anyone is free to start a non-profit org that builds homes and you can still cut yourself + employees a salary.
It is just that enlisting everything and everyone on the planet into a pure financial model that can be leveraged for rents and speculaion is what it is about.
Real estate is investment and no one ever wants their investments to devalue. And the only way to slow stop or even decrease housing is to devalue it by building beyond what’s needed. No investor will ever do that.
It is capitalism in its purest form. And no kind of free market will fix this issue.
Developers absolutely want to build and sell as many homes as possible.
Private enterprise is literally what created all the shelter in the first place. Who else is gonna build shelter? It definitely isn’t gonna be the government…
This thread does not disappoint.
Someone mentioned supply and demand and was summarily put down. And yet, that's at the top of the list in every city in the world.
Here, let's explore...picking at random:
https://www.zillow.com/homes/for_sale/La-Crescenta.dash.Mont...
16 results
https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/2713-Starfall-Dr-La-Cresc...
Built in 1972, 4 bedrooms, 3 bathrooms, 2,201 square feet.
$1,675,000
Let's move north a bit.
https://www.zillow.com/homes/Palmdale,-CA_rb/
500 results
https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/38903-Barrington-St-Palmd...?
Built in 1991, 4 bedrooms, 3 bathrooms, 2,202 square feet.
$580,000
Move north a bit more...
https://www.zillow.com/homes/california-city,-ca_rb/
500 results
https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/10600-Peach-Ave-Californi...
Built in 2022, 4 bedrooms, 3 bathrooms, 2,137 square feet.
$379,000
Of course, some of the price reflects quality of build, finish and materials. However, at a baseline, these homes are comparable.
Why does the first cost nearly three times the cost of the second and 4.4x that of the third?
When all the smoke and bullshit clears out, the answer is brutally simple:
No, zoning laws are not the main drivers.Why?
You can't double or triple the number of homes in the first neighborhood presented. It is physically and logistically impossible. The area cannot support such a move.
Someone might say: Sure you can! Buy all the homes and build apartment buildings.
Sure, in fantasy land anything is possible. Just the lawsuits from neighboring communities due to the destruction of property values, increased traffic, etc. will take 50 years to resolve. If we leave fantasy-land, this is simply impossible. The power, water an sewer system in that neighborhood might not be able to support expansion.
The point is, there's a difference between fantasy and reality.
The more expensive homes don't necessarily cost more due to higher construction costs. Although, yes, it does cost more to build in some of these neighborhoods because there is a minimum expectation of quality of materials, fit and finish.
For example, in that neighborhood, most homes have smooth flat walls without texture applied. This might not make sense to non-US reader, sorry. Spray texture is used on drywall to hide and mask imperfections. This allows for more relaxed finish requirements, massively reducing labor and all other costs. A smooth wall without texture is what's called a "Level 5" wall and so...
Scaling cities is asymptotic. You get to a point beyond which it is --outside of fantasy land-- as close to impossible as you are going to get.
Brother, we can't even build a fucking high speed train in California and you are talking about ripping-up cities to increase density.
We can't generate enough power to support the electrification of transportation, and you are saying things like "it's not even hard".
Have you ever built anything? I have. Multiple times. Let me tell you, it isn't easy. It's hard, very hard. And it easily goes exponentially expensive. Case in point, the California High Speed train --again.
The other issue often ignored in fantasy-land is this virtual-reality mentality that you can click and mouse and rebuild entire cities and neighborhoods. Well, reality isn't a video game. Things don't work that way. The relative cost of any construction today has reached astronomical levels. There isn't enough revenue to take a city of non-trivial scale and, say, double the infrastructure. Like I said, things are asymptotic. I know that's hard to understand when looking at reality as if it were a video game fantasy. Well, it isn't. Sorry.
No, what you are thinking is firmly planted in fantasy land. You might not realize it now. Give it a few decades and more experience and you might understand.
Why do I say "more experience"? Because nobody --nobody-- who truly understands construction would say the things you are saying. Only those observing from the outside think this way.
Go try to build something in a city like Los Angeles and see how much fun it is. And by that I mean, something where you need new sewers, electricity, water, roads, schools.
In my town they built a new high school at a completely new location (vacant lot, unused land, etc.).
It took THIRTHY FIVE YEARS. And they still made a mess of it. And you think densifying a city is "not even hard"? Please.
I have more than enough experience to know it can be done. I’m living that experience every day. I’m sorry you’re so bad at building things that you think it’s not possible, but luckily we’re not all incompetent.
Now, if you are talking about building where there’s nothing (3000 people per square mile is nothing), well, have at it. That’s not where housing availability is a problem.
Oh, yes, your attempt to use density to impress is hilarious. I did note you said “your neighborhood”. One or a few apartment buildings can easily cause a 10x density increase in a neighborhood, given that “neighborhood” can be just a few blocks.
If you actually want to make the point you are attempting to make, provide links to the many stories that would have been written about a non-trivial CITY increasing the population by a factor of ten within its own boundaries. Otherwise, I think you are trying to inflate two apartment buildings into something they are not.
This is about providing affordable housing for tens of millions of people. That cannot be done within the boundaries of major cities in the US. That problem is asymptotic.
I’m so glad I don’t work with anybody like you. What a fucking nightmare.
The Impact of Zoning on Housing Affordability: https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w8835/w8835...
For example, "Why do the powers that be continue to restrict land use? Don't they know that it drives up housing prices?"
Instead: "Because high and stable housing prices are desirable for society as a whole, restrictions on land use are put in place in order to carefully limit the amount of supply in the system. The people, voters and institutions doing this are not stupid or malicious, but know exactly what they are doing, and do it quite well."