The US needs to build more, not cancel zoning. With one of the lowest density in the world (36/km²) this should be a NON issue.
I don’t understand why we are stuck in this loophole of zones, affordable housing and so on. There is plenty of space!
The government could build those homes too if they really cared about it. Heck! Soviet Russia built a bunch of complexes for people to live in, sure they won’t be pretty, but better than sleeping outside. But somehow we can’t build them here in the US and we’d rather spend years and decades discussing existing zoning laws when new ones could be established pretty much all over the nation.
The subtext of the comment you're replying to is that the cities people want to live in are all full up, and people who want to live there should just go make new cities somewhere else.
They really aren’t though. Even New York is filled with tons of somewhat wasted space and excessive car infrastructure. Especially in the outer burrows.
No project has ever been cancelled due to building codes.
Permitting can be time consuming (though largely this is a function of zoning and what variances the developer is looking for in order to get to an economic density - which is nearly never “as of right - and what level of community involvement exists in approving these variances) but rarely would permitting on its own be a barrier (it would be the underlying zoning and the NIMBYism that prevents the variances).
Japan is an excellent example to follow, but that’s mostly because they a) don’t treat housing as an investment, Japanese homes basically get written off after 30-50 years and b) don’t have any local control over zoning: if the national or prefectural government says housing is going here, any locals who object can go pound sand.
Both of these would be excellent norms to import into America, but it would come with fierce resistance from the most-likely-to-vote segments of society. I don’t see it happening.
I do wonder why the work from home revolution hasn't produced a big population of people willing to live in the middle of nowhere. Is it because the people able to WFH were already urbanites not willing to live anywhere they can't walk to a Starbucks?
Have you been to the middle of nowhere? It's not glamorous and has a lot of downsides including regressive politics, shitty health care, crappy food options, no nightlife other than the bar that all the local townies drink in before going home to drunkenly beat and abuse their wives etc.
So yea, not surprised folks are signing up in droves to go live in Middle of Nowhere America.
To work from home, you still need quality internet. The further out you get from the city, the worse the quality tend to be.
No sane ISP is going to invest in fiber connections to "middle of nowhere". ISPs invest in areas where the money is likely to be in.
That's not even including the other challenges that the other person wrote; sparse areas tend to have less investments in their infrastructure as well.
People live closer to the city for all sorts of reasons; health cares systems are better, more public infrastructure in place (think cops, libraries, public transportation, etc).
New homes, apartments, etc need to be built where people need the, not wherever there is open space. Building a giant apartment building in the middle of nowhere serves no purpose if there are no jobs there.
And the reason we can't build where people need them is mostly zoning.
> I don’t understand why we are stuck in this loophole of zones, affordable housing and so on. There is plenty of space!
Sounds like you’re in favour of cancelling zoning. Cancelling just means a reevaluation of how and where we allow housing developments on existing space. It means cancelling that ineffective structure system and replacing it with something more appropriate. It means getting to actually build housing on space that didn’t allow it for reasons we’re now questioning and challenging.
> With one of the lowest density in the world (36/km²) this should be a NON issue.
The issue is traditional working practices. People are forced to cluster in large cities, as opposed to spreading around, particularly where jobs can be done remotely. There's literarly no need to have software engineers, marketing and sales people, customer support, accountants, etc in city offices. This is an issue all over the world where work hasn't adopted modern practices.
I get where you’re coming from here, but outside of a few major metro areas most people are spread around, which is precisely the problem. Driving 20 miles (or 30 minutes) to your place of work is not clustering and is causing us all sorts of economic problems. Just Wednesday my dental hygienist told me she drives around an hour to get to the office. That’s an anecdote of course, but that’s a normal thing for Americans. That’s a huge problem.
To your point about big single offices where all of these workers are “in the city” which mostly are spread out suburban office parks, I would agree, which is why we need less sprawl and more people living closer together and clustering around the cities that they are residing in.
The reason there isn't more building is because of zoning. In my neighborhood alone multiple requests for re-zoning for higher density was rejected and building didn't happen because of that.
Some types/applications of zoning are part of the issue. Not the only one, to be sure. e.g. desirable markets literally don’t have enough people to build the houses.
But zoning is often abused as a way to protect and increase the value of landowners’ assets at everyone else’s expense.
What a nightmare of a city. I tell people who haven't been there that it's a city-size concrete strip mall built on a swamp. The worst part is that it could be paradise, with smarter building. The JSC and Rice campuses are both quite nice.
Zoning is the issue. My wife is from Houston; I have certainly been there. I don't like Houston. What major lesson am I missing? Nothing about Houston redeems single-family zoning for me.
The bigger question is among cities with Houston's population, what is Houston doing wrong that other such cities are doing right? Almost always the comparisons are to much smaller cities, which is intellectually dishonest.
With all respect to your personal preferences, Houston is one of the fastest growing metro in the US, with lower housing costs, a healthy middle class, and a booming economy.
Depends on the area, but there are definitely areas that the lack of zoning (or at least enforced) makes for some slummy areas. Even in areas where high prices, like The Heights (I know a guy who used to live in one of the slumlord homes over in the area, an old large house split into 4 or 5 "apartments", so I've seen how bad it is first hand.)
The federal government owns land that nobody wants to build housing on. It's not enough just to have a house; housing is only viable in places where there is an economy to support the people who will live in the house.
You wrote about what "we" need without identifying whom else that statement represents. You may prefer higher-density housing. It may even be the case that a majority of people near where you live prefer high-density housing. This is not a universal preference nor objectively better. Those who do not share your particular taste do not necessarily prefer "living super far away from others" either.
Let's begin by acknowledging the vast middle ground between the two extreme positions and also downsides of population density.
What does utopia look like for mice? According to a researcher who did most of his work in the 1950s through1970s, it might include limitless food (of course!), multiple levels and secluded little rodent condos. These were all part of John Calhoun’s experiments to study the effects of population density on behavior. But what looked like rat utopias and mouse paradises at first quickly spiraled into out-of-control overcrowding, eventual population collapse and seemingly sinister behavior patterns.
Can we agree that at least an acre of federally owned land is neither in the desert nor "50 miles from anywhere" and may be desirable for commercial or residential use?
So are you proposing building houses on national forest? National parks?
The vast majority of federal land is BLM, which by its very nature is not desirable for development.
I could go camp on BLM land today in eastern Colorado, it just wouldn't be very nice, because it's scrub brush all the way to Kansas City (exaggerating, only slightly).
Go camp for a month on BLM land somewhere and see if it's a place you'd like to build a town.
Otherwise you're proposing building on protected public lands which I for one would prefer to remain natural.
You can still homestead parts of Alaska. If you can develop the land it's yours to keep, and I do imagine that the feds let go BLM land on occasion, but it's not going to solve housing as suggested up-thread.
Something even more rarely mentioned is that urban and built up areas are just 1% of habitable earth, forests (37%), urban crops 10% (providing 82% of calories) and animal agriculture 35% (for those remaining 18% of calories).
If we'd switch to plant based diets, we would globally free an area the space of both Americas. If this area were reforested/rewilded, we'd store enough carbon to stop climate change, stop biodiversity loss, droughts, soil erosion, eutrophication and anthropogenic oceanic dead zones, and we'd still have plenty of space to build housing for everybody.
Much of the land in the US isn’t suited for residential or commercial purposes. Building in some parts will just mean expensive water infrastructure demands and/or fire risk. That being said, there’s large swaths of Vermont, New York, PA, and the southeast which do not have these problems.
That's because very few people want to live in the 80% of Nevada that's mountainous rugged terrain or sandblasted desert, free of water, power, jobs, or infrastructure. Let's fix the problem in the places where people want to live first before we look at the federal government.
The article cites multiple YIMBY laws and political accomplishments. Has there been enough time passed to determine if these laws and abolishment’s of wasteful land use has resulted in less homelessness, more affordability, etc? I’m legitimately curious here. I’m also curious what the perhaps unintended side effects are of this. I can imagine eg. Where you don’t have to mandate two parking spaces for a 2 bedroom apartment, the landscape of the city changes additionally where car owners feel less welcome (less parking available) which might be actually a great thing, but I want studies to prove this out.
To be clear, I support policies that theoretically decrease homelessness and increase affordable housing. I too have difficulties acquiring housing. I want to know these policies actually have evidence now that they’ve been enacted.
Think of the car owners feelings! But seriously, having fewer parking spaces can incentivize better non-car transportation options (public transport and bike lanes/paths for example). Turns out that higher density areas with non-car transportation options are hugely popular and pleasant places to live.
I am not disagreeing! I’m merely pointing out that more than housing might be impacted by removing wasteful space use like mandated parking, and I wished there was a study to track that.
America adds between 600k-1.2M immigrants per year, and that's the officially counted ones. That's a surefire way to add strain to a limited supply. This is occurring in Aus, Canada, and the UK as well.
But supply is artificially constrained in most jurisdictions. Assuredly we can produce a cost effective good in 2023 which has been built for thousands of years.
I saw some article yesterday about this palatial new high school in Texas and the headline was something FREEDOM and TEXAS... but being in the Northeast, one of the biggest differences between here and there is the labor pool. In Texas, there is a near limitless supply of immigrant labor. Mexicans have built so much of California and Texas. They should get credit for what they've accomplished.
If you want to see the opposite of that, come to Vermont. Even if we can get a building approved there's nobody around to build it, and even if there was the cost of their labor is beyond the economic capacity of the region. The sooner we start issuing work visas for construction, the faster we will get out of the housing crisis.
I’m fairly certain construction in New England has a lot of Latin American labor involved. Or at least this is based on looking at the construction crews I saw working around New York City and Boston the last times I was there over the past few decades.
Sure, the major metro areas eat up whatever supply of cheaper immigrant (read: LatAm) labor is available. They're not making their way into the rest of the region... ironically, because there's nowhere to live!
When I bought my new home last year in a suburb northwest of Houston, all of the workers I've seen, both during construction and during warranty work, have almost all been Hispanic.
Texas is a red state of course, and there's a lot of irony in how proud Texans are of their Tex-Mex cuisine and low housing prices.
California likely has more stringent seismic regulations as well, while much of Texas is sitting on bedrock. Matt Risinger (TX builder with a YouTube channel) decries homes sheathed in nothing more than cardboard, so other building code items may also be more lax in Texas.
No. It's the zoning that mandates minimum-lot-sized single family residents on most of the country's urban residential areas. Nobody seriously advocates cancelling SimCity-style R/C/I zoning.
We should do that. But it's not principally the thing we're talking about when we discuss restrictive zoning. We're talking about a housing crisis, which is caused by restrictions on where and what housing can be built, not a commercial crisis.
It's widely prohibited. Residents (reasonably) resist new commercial developments on their blocks, and there isn't meaningful advocacy to overrule them on that. But, more importantly, residents almost universally resist increased housing density of any sort (any sort of development that increases the number of people who can live in an area), and so you also see resistance to any housing being built on commercially-zoned land.
In which case another developer will build them. Assuming the numbers make sense.
Either way refusing to allow apartments to be built because you fear they will be "luxury" is dumb. It just means that the only people who get to live there are the really rich who can afford a full-sized house.
Building luxury apartments is a good thing. This is well-studied. Where luxe apartments are sited, cost of surrounding housing drops. It shouldn't need a study to confirm, since it's simply the law of supply and demand, but: yes, when you give wealthy people who want to live in apartments new construction, they buy it in preference to gut rehabbing existing apartments.
"These are just for-profit developers building luxury apartments" is the single most common objection to new multifamily housing where I live. The irony of it is that it's always coming from single-family homeowners, all of whom practically by definition live in spaces more luxurious than any of the proposed apartments.
You experience seems to be in a broken housing market which the article is trying to fix.
All new apartments are described as luxury. It's makes them easier to sell.
If land prices are high and it takes years to get approval to build then only expensive apartments will be built because cheap apartments won't make a profit.
If only expensive housing is allowed to be built then most people will only be able to afford to rent.
You still need zoning otherwise people are going to build a poison-spewing factory right next to your house.
Eliminating zoning entirely is reactionary and going too far.
What we do need is to just pull zoning back. Really it’s just a few changes. Don’t require single family homes with yards. Allow high density residential and also allow mixed zoning where you have apartments on top of small commercial spaces. Also, remove parking minimums. That’s really going to cover 90% of the issues.
It's the same in the US: in a township you need to pull permits to build anything substantial. Usually there are default permitted things with footprint and height restriction so you can build a gazebo or a swing in your backyard but is there any place in the developed world where you can build anything without permission in a city?
Zoning changes between countries, states, provinces, districts, cities, municipalities, and neighborhoods!
In my country, there's an even longer list of exceptions to the zoning rules, and that's just at the federal level. I bet in some jurisdictions, a city council can modify these rules by simply adding an exception for a specific area, block, or development.
City planning has to be one of the most underestimated tasks for city officials. No one can really predict what will happen to a city in the near future. Just think about how many cities were *totally* unprepared for COVID in 2020. An official might have an idea as of how the city should grow in the next 10 years, but in lots of places there's an equilibrium easily disrupted by political shifts, economic downturns, or simply global dynamics that have faster impacts than what city officials can anticipate or comprehend.
Single-family zoning in America isn't really a city planning decision the way we think it is; virtually all American single-family zoning occurred in the early 20th century as a reaction to Buchanan v. Warley, which outlawed racial zoning codes; single-family zoning was a way to retain prohibitions on Black residents without having the zoning code literally say that.
Zoning plays a key role in building because it derisks investing in building capital. If I know that all the parcels around me are residentially zoned then I can build a house with confidence knowing that someone isn’t going to put a fertilizer plant next door.
Dumb, dumb, dumb. Building more =/= Cancel Zoning. And guess what? When WWII ended and people flooded into NYC, rents began to rise rapidly. You know what NYC did in 1947? Rent control. That year, there were 2 million rent controlled units, and the middle class took off like a rocket ship. You want to reduce rents? Rent control. Building expensive “luxury” apartments everywhere isn’t going to do jack shit about pricing. Set maximum rents, and provide low interest HUD loans to ensure the production of new units because the private market can’t or won’t build anything affordable if it can make bigger profits by charging more. This isn’t complicated.
That’s a bit of a non sequitur, isn’t it? NYC was confronted with a problem of rapidly rising rents, and instead of handwringing and eliminating zoning and engineering huge tax breaks, they enacted rent control. Why don’t we have the courage to act?
NYC is one of the epicenters of the housing crisis. Rent control doesn't make new housing, builders do, and zoning keeps them from doing it. You can advocate for rent control once the housing gets built.
You can’t, though. The price you seek to rent the units for dictates your profit margins, which impacts the financing sought. If you’re taking out a 10% construction loan and are building into your business plan $3,000 a month for your two bedroom, you can’t turn around and rent it out for $1,000 a month because city ordinances say so after the fact. That’s why rent control needs to happen now, and then a public finance corporation needs to be established to provide financing to build new units if the market won’t. It’s not rocket science, it’s just not politically expedient, so it’s not talked about.
I sympathize with the desire for a utopian government-run housing arrangement like this, but I think it discards the practical for the ideal...
With less restrictive zoning, more properties and building projects become financially feasible with the banks, builders, and contractors we already have. It costs the government zero money and happens automatically with the stroke of a pen.
It's much more difficult to re-engineer our entire mode of government, taxation, and housing provision than simply removing a few legal restrictions.
We don’t need government run housing arrangements. What we need are market regulations, like rent control, that work. Having the government as an available lender, to ensure capital access for developers, isn’t control, it’s working the levers of capitalism to encourage an outcome.
Look at Texas - zoning-free, no rent control, and it’s quickly becoming a housing dystopia. Prices are rising rapidly, and as you build out so quickly, your taxes rise as a clip more than twice most places, to build new schools and hire teachers and build roads, etc. and guess what? Private equity firms are snapping up homes at a huge clip, 25% nationally and much higher in Texas, and then rent them out according to algorithms that maximize their profits (in collusion with other landlords using the same software). Why build a Rube Goldberg machine to impact housing prices though the elimination of zoning, when you can affect it directly through rent control and directly incentivizing new construction of cheap units?
I think you missed my subtext, which is that rent control followed New York City into its current housing crisis. But, I will add "complete public financing for virtually all new housing" to the list of interesting ideas people have for solving housing scarcity, along with "plant based diets" and "moving everyone to federal grazing land in rural Oregon".
You’re misunderstanding my point, and your history is off. Rent control did not follow NYC to its housing crisis, NYC went through an extremely dark period of underinvestment and crime from the 1970s to the early 1990s, independent of housing. And in fact, during that time, we went from 2 million rent controlled units to 22,000 today. And I never proposed “complete public financing for virtually all new housing,” that is a bad faith way of debating me, to put words in my mouth. I said the government should be an available lender to ensure to incentivize the building of new units, and to encourage private investment. Which exists right now with governmental companies like NYC HPD. If you had any domain expertise at all, you’d know that, instead of making strawman arguments.
That was kind of my point. The burgeoning middle class had nothing to do with rent control laws.
Anyways, most of the research I'm finding contradicts your assertions.
For example, a recent paper [0] about on the housing market in Helsinki found that "new market-rate construction loosens the housing market in middle- and low-income areas even in the short run".
About restrictive zoning _not_ being an issue, a graph from a paper [1] illustrates that Los Angeles is at 92% of its zoned capacity when it had a planned capacity in the 1960s that was more than double what its current actual capacity is. From the paper: "Areas with well-organized homeowner groups dramatically decreased density as a means of controlling population growth, thus directing the future growth of L.A. to predominately low-income, minority communities - communities least able to accommodate that growth due to overcrowded housing, under-performing schools, limited park space and, in many cases, poor transit access. In short, density was directed to the path of least political resistance, a social injustice that exacerbated spatial disparities between communities." The paper asserts that, beyond the racial disparities caused, restrictive zoning has caused rent to become unaffordable and has had a negative environmental impact.
On the topic of rent control generally, one paper [2] estimates that NYC rent controls caused a 20% misallocation of rental units. Another [3] about rent controls in SF found "that landlords whose properties were exogenously covered by rent control reduced their supply of available rental housing by 15%, by either converting to condos/TICs, selling to owner occupied, or redeveloping buildings. This led to a city-wide rent increase of 5.1% and caused $2.9 billion of total loss to renters."
And this general survey [4] found "that economic research quite consistently and predominantly frowns on rent control. [The] findings cover both theoretical and empirical research on many dimensions of the issue, including housing availability, maintenance and housing quality, rental rates, political and administrative costs, and redistribution." In short, “the economics profession has reached a rare consensus: Rent control creates many more problems than it solves.”
Rent control is great for people who were lucky enough to live in them. It’s not so great for underprivileged people now who would like to move to NYC for all of the economic opportunity, but can’t because housing is so expensive. All of the rent controlled (and to a large degree, rent stabilized) apartments are off market and don’t rotate frequently because people stay in them even when they don’t need the space because moving somewhere smaller would cost more.
Housing is always expensive because human wants are infinite. Specifically the want to live in desirable places and the want to breed, breed, breed like rats. The more housing we build the more humans will reproduce to fill those houses.
Human wants are infinite in expression as well as desire. People really do want to breed; what's it going to be then? Infinite resources on 1 child or finite resources on an infinite number of children?
The same with the most desirable place to live? Is it an infinitely desirable spot or an infinite amount of space?
In any case unlimited wants in a finite system will always create compromises; especially if there are multiple actors.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 168 ms ] threadI don’t understand why we are stuck in this loophole of zones, affordable housing and so on. There is plenty of space!
The government could build those homes too if they really cared about it. Heck! Soviet Russia built a bunch of complexes for people to live in, sure they won’t be pretty, but better than sleeping outside. But somehow we can’t build them here in the US and we’d rather spend years and decades discussing existing zoning laws when new ones could be established pretty much all over the nation.
The reason more isn’t being built is zoning.
Permitting can be time consuming (though largely this is a function of zoning and what variances the developer is looking for in order to get to an economic density - which is nearly never “as of right - and what level of community involvement exists in approving these variances) but rarely would permitting on its own be a barrier (it would be the underlying zoning and the NIMBYism that prevents the variances).
Seriously, this problem doesn’t exist in other places. It has been solved 70 years ago in rest of the civilized world.
Both of these would be excellent norms to import into America, but it would come with fierce resistance from the most-likely-to-vote segments of society. I don’t see it happening.
So yea, not surprised folks are signing up in droves to go live in Middle of Nowhere America.
No sane ISP is going to invest in fiber connections to "middle of nowhere". ISPs invest in areas where the money is likely to be in.
That's not even including the other challenges that the other person wrote; sparse areas tend to have less investments in their infrastructure as well.
People live closer to the city for all sorts of reasons; health cares systems are better, more public infrastructure in place (think cops, libraries, public transportation, etc).
And the reason we can't build where people need them is mostly zoning.
Sounds like you’re in favour of cancelling zoning. Cancelling just means a reevaluation of how and where we allow housing developments on existing space. It means cancelling that ineffective structure system and replacing it with something more appropriate. It means getting to actually build housing on space that didn’t allow it for reasons we’re now questioning and challenging.
The issue is traditional working practices. People are forced to cluster in large cities, as opposed to spreading around, particularly where jobs can be done remotely. There's literarly no need to have software engineers, marketing and sales people, customer support, accountants, etc in city offices. This is an issue all over the world where work hasn't adopted modern practices.
To your point about big single offices where all of these workers are “in the city” which mostly are spread out suburban office parks, I would agree, which is why we need less sprawl and more people living closer together and clustering around the cities that they are residing in.
* Building houses on federally-owned land in the middle of rural Oregon
* Switching everybody to a plant-based diet
* Allowing all the white-collar knowledge workers to work remotely so they'll migrate out of the cities.
I'm sure we'll get other creative ideas too. But eliminating single-family zoning seems a lot simpler.
But zoning is often abused as a way to protect and increase the value of landowners’ assets at everyone else’s expense.
Everything is everywhere, in exactly the same way. City-sized concrete strip mall, indeed.
Zoning has its faults.
But lack of coherent zoning also has its faults.
So you are missing a lot.
Let's begin by acknowledging the vast middle ground between the two extreme positions and also downsides of population density.
What does utopia look like for mice? According to a researcher who did most of his work in the 1950s through1970s, it might include limitless food (of course!), multiple levels and secluded little rodent condos. These were all part of John Calhoun’s experiments to study the effects of population density on behavior. But what looked like rat utopias and mouse paradises at first quickly spiraled into out-of-control overcrowding, eventual population collapse and seemingly sinister behavior patterns.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/how-mouse-utopias-...
The vast majority of federal land is BLM, which by its very nature is not desirable for development.
I could go camp on BLM land today in eastern Colorado, it just wouldn't be very nice, because it's scrub brush all the way to Kansas City (exaggerating, only slightly).
Go camp for a month on BLM land somewhere and see if it's a place you'd like to build a town.
Otherwise you're proposing building on protected public lands which I for one would prefer to remain natural.
You can still homestead parts of Alaska. If you can develop the land it's yours to keep, and I do imagine that the feds let go BLM land on occasion, but it's not going to solve housing as suggested up-thread.
No, I prefer National Forests that are open to my recreation than barbed wire and no trespass signs.
If we'd switch to plant based diets, we would globally free an area the space of both Americas. If this area were reforested/rewilded, we'd store enough carbon to stop climate change, stop biodiversity loss, droughts, soil erosion, eutrophication and anthropogenic oceanic dead zones, and we'd still have plenty of space to build housing for everybody.
https://ourworldindata.org/land-use
https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets
https://ourworldindata.org/drivers-of-deforestation
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/320356605_Agricultu...
https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/press-release/our-glob...
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26231772/
To be clear, I support policies that theoretically decrease homelessness and increase affordable housing. I too have difficulties acquiring housing. I want to know these policies actually have evidence now that they’ve been enacted.
Think of the car owners feelings! But seriously, having fewer parking spaces can incentivize better non-car transportation options (public transport and bike lanes/paths for example). Turns out that higher density areas with non-car transportation options are hugely popular and pleasant places to live.
If you want to see the opposite of that, come to Vermont. Even if we can get a building approved there's nobody around to build it, and even if there was the cost of their labor is beyond the economic capacity of the region. The sooner we start issuing work visas for construction, the faster we will get out of the housing crisis.
Texas is a red state of course, and there's a lot of irony in how proud Texans are of their Tex-Mex cuisine and low housing prices.
It's hard to say. It's a multifactor problem.
When developers are allowed to build apartments, they build luxury apartments.
As long as profit is the motive, the affordability half is likely to be neglected.
I also feel like building more rental properties serves the property owners more than it does the "dweller".
Which is what you'd expect to happen in a free market.
Absent a reason, why would developers voluntarily choose to build an option that would make them less money?
Either way refusing to allow apartments to be built because you fear they will be "luxury" is dumb. It just means that the only people who get to live there are the really rich who can afford a full-sized house.
"These are just for-profit developers building luxury apartments" is the single most common objection to new multifamily housing where I live. The irony of it is that it's always coming from single-family homeowners, all of whom practically by definition live in spaces more luxurious than any of the proposed apartments.
So only 60+ stories towers gets built since the initial permitting cost is the same.
All new apartments are described as luxury. It's makes them easier to sell.
If land prices are high and it takes years to get approval to build then only expensive apartments will be built because cheap apartments won't make a profit.
If only expensive housing is allowed to be built then most people will only be able to afford to rent.
Eliminating zoning entirely is reactionary and going too far.
What we do need is to just pull zoning back. Really it’s just a few changes. Don’t require single family homes with yards. Allow high density residential and also allow mixed zoning where you have apartments on top of small commercial spaces. Also, remove parking minimums. That’s really going to cover 90% of the issues.
Where every single building needs state permission and full review to be built. Which takes months to years per building, instead of days or weeks.
In completely unrelated news the UK has some of the most expensive smallest housing in Europe.
In my country, there's an even longer list of exceptions to the zoning rules, and that's just at the federal level. I bet in some jurisdictions, a city council can modify these rules by simply adding an exception for a specific area, block, or development.
City planning has to be one of the most underestimated tasks for city officials. No one can really predict what will happen to a city in the near future. Just think about how many cities were *totally* unprepared for COVID in 2020. An official might have an idea as of how the city should grow in the next 10 years, but in lots of places there's an equilibrium easily disrupted by political shifts, economic downturns, or simply global dynamics that have faster impacts than what city officials can anticipate or comprehend.
Obviously some places don’t have it and it works out fine: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Fertilizer_Company_expl...
Getting rid of zoning doesn’t suddenly make more trades. Plumbers, roofers, and electricians are in short supply because the gfc wiped them out.
Why not better, simpler zoning with well understood and simple rules for changing the zoning?
With less restrictive zoning, more properties and building projects become financially feasible with the banks, builders, and contractors we already have. It costs the government zero money and happens automatically with the stroke of a pen.
It's much more difficult to re-engineer our entire mode of government, taxation, and housing provision than simply removing a few legal restrictions.
Look at Texas - zoning-free, no rent control, and it’s quickly becoming a housing dystopia. Prices are rising rapidly, and as you build out so quickly, your taxes rise as a clip more than twice most places, to build new schools and hire teachers and build roads, etc. and guess what? Private equity firms are snapping up homes at a huge clip, 25% nationally and much higher in Texas, and then rent them out according to algorithms that maximize their profits (in collusion with other landlords using the same software). Why build a Rube Goldberg machine to impact housing prices though the elimination of zoning, when you can affect it directly through rent control and directly incentivizing new construction of cheap units?
That was kind of my point. The burgeoning middle class had nothing to do with rent control laws.
Anyways, most of the research I'm finding contradicts your assertions.
For example, a recent paper [0] about on the housing market in Helsinki found that "new market-rate construction loosens the housing market in middle- and low-income areas even in the short run".
About restrictive zoning _not_ being an issue, a graph from a paper [1] illustrates that Los Angeles is at 92% of its zoned capacity when it had a planned capacity in the 1960s that was more than double what its current actual capacity is. From the paper: "Areas with well-organized homeowner groups dramatically decreased density as a means of controlling population growth, thus directing the future growth of L.A. to predominately low-income, minority communities - communities least able to accommodate that growth due to overcrowded housing, under-performing schools, limited park space and, in many cases, poor transit access. In short, density was directed to the path of least political resistance, a social injustice that exacerbated spatial disparities between communities." The paper asserts that, beyond the racial disparities caused, restrictive zoning has caused rent to become unaffordable and has had a negative environmental impact.
On the topic of rent control generally, one paper [2] estimates that NYC rent controls caused a 20% misallocation of rental units. Another [3] about rent controls in SF found "that landlords whose properties were exogenously covered by rent control reduced their supply of available rental housing by 15%, by either converting to condos/TICs, selling to owner occupied, or redeveloping buildings. This led to a city-wide rent increase of 5.1% and caused $2.9 billion of total loss to renters."
And this general survey [4] found "that economic research quite consistently and predominantly frowns on rent control. [The] findings cover both theoretical and empirical research on many dimensions of the issue, including housing availability, maintenance and housing quality, rental rates, political and administrative costs, and redistribution." In short, “the economics profession has reached a rare consensus: Rent control creates many more problems than it solves.”
[0] https://ideas.repec.org/p/fer/wpaper/146.html
[1] https://i.imgur.com/EIyespr.png from https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6k64g20f#page-1
[2] https://users.nber.org/~luttmer/rentcontrol.pdf
[3] https://econpapers.repec.org/paper/redsed018/918.htm
[4] https://econjwatch.org/File+download/238/2009-01-jenkins-rea...
The same with the most desirable place to live? Is it an infinitely desirable spot or an infinite amount of space?
In any case unlimited wants in a finite system will always create compromises; especially if there are multiple actors.