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Land and not housing is a positional good, but socializing it can help reduce the effects. Density only actually needs to be very high for a very, very tiny fr

Land and not housing is a positional good, but socializing it can help reduce the effects. Density only actually needs to be very high for a very, very tiny fraction of land. In SF, for instance, something like 80% of the land is zoned exclusively for single-family homes. You don't need elevators nor steel-frame construction to build 3-4 units where there previously was 1. A very substantial amount of inexpensive housing can be built where zoning currently disallows it. As you said though, transit becomes the next bottleneck.

Eridrus 8y ago
> Land and not housing is a positional good Yes, but the discussion about housing isn't "there is no affordable housing anywhere", but rather "there is no affordable housing near jobs and people have to commute very far", so I'm not sure there is a tonne of daylight between these two. I feel you on the zoning issue, there is plenty of space that should be upzoned, but I don't think that this line is true: "A very substantial amount of inexpensive housing can be built where zoning currently disallows it." Land costs are high, Permitting costs and fees are high, and construction costs themselves are very high atm, even if you're not putting in elevators or steel frame construction you're going to have very high costs that you can't recoup from low income renters. Maybe if you introduced a land tax that made it expensive to have unimproved single family homes you could get somewhere, but as it is I don't think SF has the balance sheet to just spend its way out of this problem right now. But even then, I think this is a problem that will take decades to resolve, since SF has gotten itself into a chicken & egg situation where everything is expensive because everything else is expensive.