16 ms·

A proposal to roll back exclusionary zoning would make housing more affordable

160 points by petethomas 8y ago

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
bradleyjg 8y ago
The charts at the top are eye opening. More and more of our income is going to pay for pieces of land. Unlike computers, TVs, and even troublesome areas like healthcare the land is not getting better and better. It’s instead a purely zero sum game. We probably can’t eliminate the scourge of land rents altogether but we can stop making the problem worse by putting in place more and more policies designed to raise housing prices rather than lower them. Such policies are exactly the opposite of what the government should strive for.
- FussyZeus 8y ago
  Because we can make more computers, execute more healthcare services, etc. Land is a zero sum game; we have a fixed amount, and while it's possible to create more, it's prohibitively expensive to do so. Add to it, land is the primary method by which "old money" remains in that category.
  - maxerickson 8y ago
    The US isn't particularly space constrained. In city cores the lack of space is significant. For most of the country, there's plenty of room to build.
    - dsfyu404ed 8y ago
      Distance costs money or time (basically the same thing at the macro level). When you have things spread out people need to eat the large opportunity cost of forgoing jobs or other opportunities that are far away or spent a lot of time and money commuting. If cities prioritized making it easy to commute in and out that would make distance cost less, effectively the same as increasing density. The problem is that there's many decades of pent up demand for both housing and transit infrastructure. There's no cheap way out of the situation. It's going to take a hell of a lot of either/both in order to measurably improve people's quality of life.
      - munificent 8y ago
        Instead of trying to put cheap homes where the jobs are, we could also try to put jobs where the cheap homes are. People constantly talk about the former, but I almost never see people talk about the latter.
        mixmastamyk 8y ago
        Jobs that require "facetime" can't do that. The only ones that can are remote work. I'm in favor, but most companies resist even when feasible. Not to mention a city is more than housing. It's nice to walk to the corner pub, go to a theatre, sporting event, etc.
        bradleyjg 8y ago
        The former problem is much easier than the latter. In order to accomplish it we just need to governments to stop actively blocking it from happening. We have no idea where to even begin with the latter. The best we can do is throw a whole bunch of untested ideas at the wall and hope one works.
        saosebastiao 8y ago
        > The best we can do is throw a whole bunch of untested ideas at the wall and hope one works. You're such an optimist. Governments around the world have been trying to relocate employment and labor for centuries and the best they have come up with is ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
        bluGill 8y ago
        I've talked about it, but I seem to be the only one... In any new suburb or city you are not allowed to put jobs where the people are. There is exactly one house within comfortable walking distance of my office: the farmhouse that was here before the area was developed. If I bought a lot in this office park I would not be allowed to put apartments or houses. A couple miles away there are lots of houses, I wouldn't be allowed to buy a few and put in an office. A few miles in a different direction is a shopping mall that is failing. If I bought the mall I wouldn't be allowed to rent space for offices or apartments without first doing a zoning change, and then I'd have to choose either apartments or office, I wouldn't be allowed to put a house in the parking lot that is bigger than either apartments or offices would need.
  - bradleyjg 8y ago
    It’s true that it’s inherently a zero sum game. As I said I don’t think we can eliminate the drag altogether. But there are lots of interventions at all three levels of government that make the problem worse. And worse yet these aren’t unintended consequences, it’s governments’ policy to try to increase the costs of housing. Various cities have tiny band aid programs under the rubric of affordable housing but the low hanging fruit is to stop actively intervening to make the problem worse.
  - munificent 8y ago
    > Land is a zero sum game; we have a fixed amount, and while it's possible to create more, it's prohibitively expensive to do so. Yes, but that sum in the US is huge. Drive around the midwest or any region outside of an urban core and its empty space as far as the eye can see. The problem is large-scale economic and demographic changes. The US used to have: * A culture that prized living in suburbia away from dense areas. * Labor-intensive agriculture that provided a lot of jobs in rural areas. * Labor-intensive manufacturing that provided a lot of jobs in a large number of smaller cities. All of those forces encouraged the population to spread out. Those forces are evaporating. The suburbs are now seen as soulless sources of miserable commutes. Automation and consolidation has dramatically reduced the number of farm employees needed for a given square acre of land. Automation and cheap imports from other countries have eliminated manufacturing jobs. Without those forces counterbalancing things, there is a strong trend towards consolidating into large metropolises which can't absorb the growth that quickly. We can try to stuff every more dense housing in those cities and gradually turn them into concrete boxes. Some amount of densification is good. But instead of investing almost entirely in that, I really wish the US was working to try to make small and mid-size cities more desirable too.
    - mixmastamyk 8y ago
      > large metropolises which can't absorb the growth They choose not to. > more dense housing in those cities… turn them into concrete boxes A "US NIMBY-like" viewpoint. Paris is denser than the average city and lovely, as are many EU cities. US cities designed before the car took over usually nicer and more space-efficient as well, but are few and mostly on the East coast.
    - cagenut 8y ago
      why? just because you grew up that way? stop fighting it. lots of sprawl/small-cities is bad. to put it a little (but not a lot) hyperbolically: we should retreat to megalopolises and declare everything else state parks.
    - village-idiot 8y ago
      Suburbia is a short term and unsustainable model. The long term costs of purposefully watering down your economic activity per infrastructure dollar is horrible.
  - Epenthesis 8y ago
    Land is zero sum (which is why a Land Value Tax is such a good idea), but housing, which is what people actually consume is not. We have the technology to build more housing, just not the regulatory regime, which is what this article is about.
    - jgeada 8y ago
      That is the most significant comment here. People keep going on about land when the real problem is housing. US housing density is awfully low. Our country's major population expansion took place after the car and our model of building cities went horizontal rather than vertical.
- Symmetry 8y ago
  For a long time there was a roughly equal balance in the US between the amount of money paid out as wages and the profits that go to capital. Recently that balance has gotten skewed with 60% going to capital. But basically all of that skew is due to rising rents and housing prices.
  - ramblerouser 8y ago
    A big part of it is wage stagnation too. The average American hasnt had a meaningful raise since 1973, that's half a century. Not good. Growth of the labor supply and repeal of trade protections for industries that employ low-skill workers have caused it.
    - Symmetry 8y ago
      This metric is comparing returns to capital to total returns to labor, not the median returns to labor. Median wages haven't been doing too well recently due to rising inequality but gains by the best paid professionals would be enough to make up for that on this metric except for rising housing costs.
      - ramblerouser 8y ago
        I dont see how a low median return plays no role in total returns. If the median were higher surely the total would be higher no?
        Symmetry 8y ago
        All things being equal, raising the median wage income raises the mean wage income. But the mean wage income can also rise form things that don't raise the mean income, like people in the top quartile being paid more. And you get the total wages paid out by multiplying the number of wage earners by the mean wage, not the median wage.
- mendelsd 8y ago
  Governments aren't striving for ideal outcomes - government is necessarily a bunch of scoundrels whose chief goal is to stay in power, which is achieved by giving sufficient bungs to donors and voters: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11612989-the-dictator-s-handbook https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11612989-the-dictator-s-... Sorry to ruin your day ;-)
xvedejas 8y ago
In Japan, zoning is handled federally; and the result is much more affordable cities. "Why Tokyo is the land of rising home construction but not prices" https://www.ft.com/content/023562e2-54a6-11e6-befd-2fc0c26b3c60 https://www.ft.com/content/023562e2-54a6-11e6-befd-2fc0c26b3... An overview of zoning practices there: http://urbankchoze.blogspot.com/2014/04/japanese-zoning.html http://urbankchoze.blogspot.com/2014/04/japanese-zoning.html
- mc32 8y ago
  Granted, but a decreasing population and a growing number of uninhabited houses sure doesn’t add to housing pressure. So it helps, but it may not account for all of it.
  - darksaints 8y ago
    That's not true for Tokyo, which has been growing rapidly for 30 years now. Yet Tokyo's prices have remained flat during that time.
    - timr 8y ago
      You can't just cherry pick a single factor: Tokyo sprawls, but it's not especially dense. It has smaller buildings, much smaller apartments, and higher costs per square foot. Japan has better transit than the west, which makes long-distance commutes feasible. Moreover, there's a culture (and a tax system) that treats housing as a depreciating asset. On top of all of that, the Japanese tend to live together in communal units, with children living with parents long past the point where it would be considered okay in the west. And housing is still expensive relative to the local economy (which has been depressed for 30 years, by the way). All of these factors (and more) result in the housing economy you see in Japan. HN people love to fixate on zoning, but it's not even close to the whole story. If we suddenly asked westerners to live the way Japanese people do, there would be open revolt and riots in the streets.
      - saosebastiao 8y ago
mendelsd 8y ago
If you want to make housing affordable you will need to reckon with this: http://positivemoney.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/UK-House-Prices-1997-2014.png http://positivemoney.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/UK-House... House prices move with mortgage credit growth. Credit growth is one of the key pillars of the politically sustained Ponzi-scheme that is the modern urban housing market.
- flaque 8y ago
  That is one crap graph. What’s the Y axis?
  - iamdave 8y ago
    I'm going to guess using the context clue of the title of the graph that it's the average cost of a house in thousands?
    - jgraham 8y ago
      Pretty sure it must be percentage of the 1997 value, otherwise it's hard to understand how the scale can accomodate both house prices and population in a single set of units.
- maxxxxx 8y ago
  Easy access to credit drives up prices also in health care and education.
- mywittyname 8y ago
  Banks love mortgages because they are easy, safe ways to earn a bit more than the federal rate. Wealthy consumers love mortgages because it's a cheap way to leverage a huge asset for market-rate returns. Normal consumers love mortgages because it allows them to buy a house. Good luck taking that away. Additionally, while access to credit raises housing prices, there's no guarantee that removing access to that credit will in any way make housing more affordable for moderate- or low-income people. More people would be forced to rent and it's possible that the wealthy apartment owners will engage in rent seeking and rents will just raise to match or exceed the cost of a mortgage. That will rob lower income people of their biggest opportunity for wealth creation (housing appreciation) and increase wealth inequality.
matchbok 8y ago
Seems like it could work. Nonsense local policies to encourage "affordable" housing like inclusionary zoning have been huge failures. In big cities, we just need way more housing. Yet NIMBYs fight it at every step, esp in SF.
- bilbo0s 8y ago
  Local policies actually make a lot of sense in most places, as most places have unique concerns. In Madison Wisconsin there were, for a long time, policies that tended to discourage building on the main east-side thoroughfare. Over time, no one really remembered why those policies, some of which one might construe as "inclusionary zoning", were in place. So we jumped on the urban development bandwagon. We were "All In" on it. I mean getting rid of older policies, introducing things like TIF for that very east side corridor, the whole nine yards. Fast forward to today, and there are buildings built down that corridor with giant footprints. And some people even think they are beautiful. So we congratulated ourselves. Then something strange started to happen. Whenever it rained, that very corridor would flood. Odd? It never did that before? Well, we never built like that down that corridor before. Not to worry. The flooding wasn't really that bad. But it's gotten worse and worse. And only now are people starting to realize why those old guys back before and during the Greatest Generation wanted to discourage building anything critical there. Long story short, we're a city situated on a system of five lakes, we can't just look at what everyone else in the nation does and copy them. We need to follow a plan that makes sense for our geography. We need policies that make sense for us, even if on the surface, those policies appear to hamstring us economically. I'm sure Madison is not special in this regard. It's likely most cities have some feature endemic to them that would similarly constrain where and how a wise man would build in that municipality. Like us, most cities have probably even forgotten the why of their constraints. I sympathize. But just as a piece of kindly intended advice from a people who have "been there, done that, currently trying to clean up the mess"... don't look at old policies and say they're "outdated", or "nonsense"... look at old policies and ask, "OK, what was the reason for this?"
  - burlesona 8y ago
    Fair, but the root reason for many of the core zoning codes is that the WW2 and Boomer generations felt that cars were the future and that low density car-oriented development was the only kind of thing they wanted to be allowed near them, mostly for aesthetic reasons and also because they perceived (accurately at the beginning) that “those people,” meaning criminals but mostly just low income people, wouldn’t be able to follow, and thus they’d have their idillic suburban life. So when we examine those root causes it turns out that they’re pretty crap and we don’t need to keep them around.
pjc50 8y ago
It seems like the underlying mechanism is https://www.citylab.com/equity/2018/08/ben-carsons-new-argument-against-fair-housing-rules-its-about-nimbys/567449/ https://www.citylab.com/equity/2018/08/ben-carsons-new-argum... , which is a rather different spin.
temp-dude-87844 8y ago
As with most things, engineering a blunt policy solution will lead to unintended consequences. If this proposal goes into effect, by clobbering local zoning codes, anything with sufficient money behind it is going to get built. This typically means projects that optimize for the developer's ability to extract rent from residents: 3 or 4-story apartments with small unit sizes, basic finishes made to aesthetically look high-end, and bare minimum green space or community space. A common approach is to use high-end appliances, a one-time cost, to ask for higher rent. This is the sort of construction that pops up in American suburbia today, where there's sufficient demand, and gets adapted to a more "urban" form with flat roofs and minimal changes. Despite many of these projects being built, there's a price floor beyond which the rent will not drop, because the developer has to make payments on loans and maintain a profit. Therefore, while housing affordability is sure to improve in some places where it's absurdly high, it won't meaningfully be altered in places whose urban form is predominantly suburban. This is doubly so because the plentiful supply of single-family homes offers an a low-cost way to get started as a landlord. Developers also have a choice on where to build. If it's cheaper after expenses to assemble a large parcel in Morgan Hill or Tracy or Vacaville, build out the site, and charge those rents, than to do the same in West Portal, one of them isn't getting built.
- joshe 8y ago
  The right way to do this is to make sure that a small amount of money will be sufficient. You want to redevelop a one story Sunset place into three stories? Meet the building codes and you are good to go. This would open up development to small contractors and small design/build architects. You wouldn't hire a city fixer + a lawyer + a pr person, you'd just hire an architect and a contractor. Each unit could be built much more cheaply. Right now you could take a $1 million Sunset house and convert it into three $800,000 flats in a wood frame house. Developers would be DELIGHTED to do that. The current system adds 5 years and a million dollars to each redevelopment. Developers don't want to build stuff for rich people, they want return on investment. They are as happy making 10% on affordable housing as making 10% on luxury housing.
- sjg007 8y ago
  "the plentiful supply of single-family homes" ... huh? the issue is that there is not a plentiful supply of said homes.
joecot 8y ago
> On Aug. 13, Carson proposed requiring that cities that receive federal housing grants reduce their use of exclusionary zoning. Question: is there anything stopping these cities from just deciding to decline federal housing grants? The biggest culprit in this issue is Silicon Valley. Do they really need Federal housing grants to make people want to move there? The issue is too much demand already. If Carson forces the issue, I can absolutely see San Francisco's city leadership just declining grants instead of changing their zoning. That might be enough to get some people voted out, but it'll take a while.
- grandmczeb 8y ago
  HUD grants are a major source of funding for things like fighting homelessness. The city could decline them, but they would have to make up the difference.
  - joecot 8y ago
    Would they though? Are cities required to make up the difference? Problem: cities are artificially keeping housing prices up, pushing lower income people out in favor of the upper class. The housing market is forcing lower income people out of cities. Solution: tell cities they have to stop artificially keeping housing prices up, or the federal government will stop subsidizing low income housing and subsidized loans. If the goal is to gentrify your city and keep prices high, how is that a real threat? That solution is only a threat if you assume these cities aren't paying attention to what's happening at all, and I don't think San Francisco's leaders are that dim.
    - grandmczeb 8y ago
      There’s a pretty clear political mandate in SF to provide things like healthcare and housing for the homeless, part of which is paid for by HUD. If a large chunk of that budget went away, I doubt voters would want to cut services, so the city would have to make it up themselves.
    - bluGill 8y ago
      It isn't just about your city. If the working poor find it advantageous to live your city for one half way across the state that is less people to work the lower income jobs - now it is more expensive to get the toilets cleaned in the office. This raises your cost of living, and lowers it in the other city. Of course how this all works out is very complex and messy and will take dozens of years before we see anything significant.
specialp 8y ago
I live on Long Island, and it is expensive. Schools are funded mostly through high property taxes. It is nearly impossible to get high density housing approved for working age people. The constituents want only 55+ for complexes so they can reap the school tax benefits without more students. So this in effect keeps affordable housing out as developers either build 3000+ sq foot "luxury homes" or 55+ communities.
- lxmorj 8y ago
  Oh, smart move! Never thought of using that strategy to get advantaged school funding.
afpx 8y ago
One thing to note is that it’s the land itself that appreciates. The housing built on top of it generally doesn’t. That is, structures generally depreciate unless labor and material costs rise significantly. So, why not cap the profits that can be gained from squatting on land? Or increase taxes on under-utilized land? Then, wouldn’t land owners have incentive to build more housing?
- rpedela 8y ago
  Maybe that would help in less developed areas, but I doubt it would work in a place like Boulder, CO. Boulder rent just keeps getting more and more expensive. There are several reasons for this but most of the land is being used already. Changing zoning laws to have more mixed residential, office, and retail would probably help.
- darksaints 8y ago
  Density-restrictive zoning increases our demand for land. I, for example, only need about 1000sf of living space. In city where the minimum lot size is 3000sf and maximum FAR is 30%, my demand for land is 3000sf. However, in a city where 12 story buildings are abundant, my demand for land is only about 100sf, including proportionally allocated common area space. By not allowing dense housing, city zoning codes are making affordability illegal by statute.
pessimizer 8y ago
I looked for an explanation of "exclusionary zoning" in the article, but I guess it just means "zoning." It's always great when an administration can repurpose unimplemented legislation designed to reduce segregation, and use it to enrich property speculators.
mikevp 8y ago
Interesting... At first, I thought nominating Carson for head of HUD was a very strange choice. He's a neurosurgeon. Why??? But then... He was Director of Pediatric Neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins, so he had some administrative experience. Then, I realized that Ben Carson has one bit of very relevant life experience that no other HUD director has ever had: He grew up in The Projects. I thought then that that might lead to something interesting. Seems I may have been right.

160 points by petethomas 8y ago

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

The charts at the top are eye opening. More and more of our income is going to pay for pieces of land. Unlike computers, TVs, and even troublesome areas like healthcare the land is not getting better and better. It’s instead a purely zero sum game. We probably can’t eliminate the scourge of land rents altogether but we can stop making the problem worse by putting in place more and more policies designed to raise housing prices rather than lower them. Such policies are exactly the opposite of what the government should strive for.

FussyZeus 8y ago
Because we can make more computers, execute more healthcare services, etc. Land is a zero sum game; we have a fixed amount, and while it's possible to create more, it's prohibitively expensive to do so. Add to it, land is the primary method by which "old money" remains in that category.
- maxerickson 8y ago
  The US isn't particularly space constrained. In city cores the lack of space is significant. For most of the country, there's plenty of room to build.
  - dsfyu404ed 8y ago
    Distance costs money or time (basically the same thing at the macro level). When you have things spread out people need to eat the large opportunity cost of forgoing jobs or other opportunities that are far away or spent a lot of time and money commuting. If cities prioritized making it easy to commute in and out that would make distance cost less, effectively the same as increasing density. The problem is that there's many decades of pent up demand for both housing and transit infrastructure. There's no cheap way out of the situation. It's going to take a hell of a lot of either/both in order to measurably improve people's quality of life.
    - munificent 8y ago
      Instead of trying to put cheap homes where the jobs are, we could also try to put jobs where the cheap homes are. People constantly talk about the former, but I almost never see people talk about the latter.
      - mixmastamyk 8y ago
        Jobs that require "facetime" can't do that. The only ones that can are remote work. I'm in favor, but most companies resist even when feasible. Not to mention a city is more than housing. It's nice to walk to the corner pub, go to a theatre, sporting event, etc.
      - bradleyjg 8y ago
        The former problem is much easier than the latter. In order to accomplish it we just need to governments to stop actively blocking it from happening. We have no idea where to even begin with the latter. The best we can do is throw a whole bunch of untested ideas at the wall and hope one works.
        saosebastiao 8y ago
        > The best we can do is throw a whole bunch of untested ideas at the wall and hope one works. You're such an optimist. Governments around the world have been trying to relocate employment and labor for centuries and the best they have come up with is ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
        bluGill 8y ago
        I've talked about it, but I seem to be the only one... In any new suburb or city you are not allowed to put jobs where the people are. There is exactly one house within comfortable walking distance of my office: the farmhouse that was here before the area was developed. If I bought a lot in this office park I would not be allowed to put apartments or houses. A couple miles away there are lots of houses, I wouldn't be allowed to buy a few and put in an office. A few miles in a different direction is a shopping mall that is failing. If I bought the mall I wouldn't be allowed to rent space for offices or apartments without first doing a zoning change, and then I'd have to choose either apartments or office, I wouldn't be allowed to put a house in the parking lot that is bigger than either apartments or offices would need.
- bradleyjg 8y ago
  It’s true that it’s inherently a zero sum game. As I said I don’t think we can eliminate the drag altogether. But there are lots of interventions at all three levels of government that make the problem worse. And worse yet these aren’t unintended consequences, it’s governments’ policy to try to increase the costs of housing. Various cities have tiny band aid programs under the rubric of affordable housing but the low hanging fruit is to stop actively intervening to make the problem worse.
- munificent 8y ago
  > Land is a zero sum game; we have a fixed amount, and while it's possible to create more, it's prohibitively expensive to do so. Yes, but that sum in the US is huge. Drive around the midwest or any region outside of an urban core and its empty space as far as the eye can see. The problem is large-scale economic and demographic changes. The US used to have: * A culture that prized living in suburbia away from dense areas. * Labor-intensive agriculture that provided a lot of jobs in rural areas. * Labor-intensive manufacturing that provided a lot of jobs in a large number of smaller cities. All of those forces encouraged the population to spread out. Those forces are evaporating. The suburbs are now seen as soulless sources of miserable commutes. Automation and consolidation has dramatically reduced the number of farm employees needed for a given square acre of land. Automation and cheap imports from other countries have eliminated manufacturing jobs. Without those forces counterbalancing things, there is a strong trend towards consolidating into large metropolises which can't absorb the growth that quickly. We can try to stuff every more dense housing in those cities and gradually turn them into concrete boxes. Some amount of densification is good. But instead of investing almost entirely in that, I really wish the US was working to try to make small and mid-size cities more desirable too.
  - mixmastamyk 8y ago
    > large metropolises which can't absorb the growth They choose not to. > more dense housing in those cities… turn them into concrete boxes A "US NIMBY-like" viewpoint. Paris is denser than the average city and lovely, as are many EU cities. US cities designed before the car took over usually nicer and more space-efficient as well, but are few and mostly on the East coast.
  - cagenut 8y ago
    why? just because you grew up that way? stop fighting it. lots of sprawl/small-cities is bad. to put it a little (but not a lot) hyperbolically: we should retreat to megalopolises and declare everything else state parks.
  - village-idiot 8y ago
    Suburbia is a short term and unsustainable model. The long term costs of purposefully watering down your economic activity per infrastructure dollar is horrible.
- Epenthesis 8y ago
  Land is zero sum (which is why a Land Value Tax is such a good idea), but housing, which is what people actually consume is not. We have the technology to build more housing, just not the regulatory regime, which is what this article is about.
  - jgeada 8y ago
    That is the most significant comment here. People keep going on about land when the real problem is housing. US housing density is awfully low. Our country's major population expansion took place after the car and our model of building cities went horizontal rather than vertical.
Symmetry 8y ago
For a long time there was a roughly equal balance in the US between the amount of money paid out as wages and the profits that go to capital. Recently that balance has gotten skewed with 60% going to capital. But basically all of that skew is due to rising rents and housing prices.
- ramblerouser 8y ago
  A big part of it is wage stagnation too. The average American hasnt had a meaningful raise since 1973, that's half a century. Not good. Growth of the labor supply and repeal of trade protections for industries that employ low-skill workers have caused it.
  - Symmetry 8y ago
    This metric is comparing returns to capital to total returns to labor, not the median returns to labor. Median wages haven't been doing too well recently due to rising inequality but gains by the best paid professionals would be enough to make up for that on this metric except for rising housing costs.
    - ramblerouser 8y ago
      I dont see how a low median return plays no role in total returns. If the median were higher surely the total would be higher no?
      - Symmetry 8y ago
        All things being equal, raising the median wage income raises the mean wage income. But the mean wage income can also rise form things that don't raise the mean income, like people in the top quartile being paid more. And you get the total wages paid out by multiplying the number of wage earners by the mean wage, not the median wage.
mendelsd 8y ago
Governments aren't striving for ideal outcomes - government is necessarily a bunch of scoundrels whose chief goal is to stay in power, which is achieved by giving sufficient bungs to donors and voters: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11612989-the-dictator-s-handbook https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11612989-the-dictator-s-... Sorry to ruin your day ;-)

xvedejas 8y ago

In Japan, zoning is handled federally; and the result is much more affordable cities. "Why Tokyo is the land of rising home construction but not prices" https://www.ft.com/content/023562e2-54a6-11e6-befd-2fc0c26b3c60 https://www.ft.com/content/023562e2-54a6-11e6-befd-2fc0c26b3... An overview of zoning practices there: http://urbankchoze.blogspot.com/2014/04/japanese-zoning.html http://urbankchoze.blogspot.com/2014/04/japanese-zoning.html

mc32 8y ago
Granted, but a decreasing population and a growing number of uninhabited houses sure doesn’t add to housing pressure. So it helps, but it may not account for all of it.
- darksaints 8y ago
  That's not true for Tokyo, which has been growing rapidly for 30 years now. Yet Tokyo's prices have remained flat during that time.
  - timr 8y ago
    You can't just cherry pick a single factor: Tokyo sprawls, but it's not especially dense. It has smaller buildings, much smaller apartments, and higher costs per square foot. Japan has better transit than the west, which makes long-distance commutes feasible. Moreover, there's a culture (and a tax system) that treats housing as a depreciating asset. On top of all of that, the Japanese tend to live together in communal units, with children living with parents long past the point where it would be considered okay in the west. And housing is still expensive relative to the local economy (which has been depressed for 30 years, by the way). All of these factors (and more) result in the housing economy you see in Japan. HN people love to fixate on zoning, but it's not even close to the whole story. If we suddenly asked westerners to live the way Japanese people do, there would be open revolt and riots in the streets.
    - saosebastiao 8y ago

mendelsd 8y ago

If you want to make housing affordable you will need to reckon with this: http://positivemoney.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/UK-House-Prices-1997-2014.png http://positivemoney.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/UK-House... House prices move with mortgage credit growth. Credit growth is one of the key pillars of the politically sustained Ponzi-scheme that is the modern urban housing market.

flaque 8y ago
That is one crap graph. What’s the Y axis?
- iamdave 8y ago
  I'm going to guess using the context clue of the title of the graph that it's the average cost of a house in thousands?
  - jgraham 8y ago
    Pretty sure it must be percentage of the 1997 value, otherwise it's hard to understand how the scale can accomodate both house prices and population in a single set of units.
maxxxxx 8y ago
Easy access to credit drives up prices also in health care and education.
mywittyname 8y ago
Banks love mortgages because they are easy, safe ways to earn a bit more than the federal rate. Wealthy consumers love mortgages because it's a cheap way to leverage a huge asset for market-rate returns. Normal consumers love mortgages because it allows them to buy a house. Good luck taking that away. Additionally, while access to credit raises housing prices, there's no guarantee that removing access to that credit will in any way make housing more affordable for moderate- or low-income people. More people would be forced to rent and it's possible that the wealthy apartment owners will engage in rent seeking and rents will just raise to match or exceed the cost of a mortgage. That will rob lower income people of their biggest opportunity for wealth creation (housing appreciation) and increase wealth inequality.

matchbok 8y ago

Seems like it could work. Nonsense local policies to encourage "affordable" housing like inclusionary zoning have been huge failures. In big cities, we just need way more housing. Yet NIMBYs fight it at every step, esp in SF.

bilbo0s 8y ago
Local policies actually make a lot of sense in most places, as most places have unique concerns. In Madison Wisconsin there were, for a long time, policies that tended to discourage building on the main east-side thoroughfare. Over time, no one really remembered why those policies, some of which one might construe as "inclusionary zoning", were in place. So we jumped on the urban development bandwagon. We were "All In" on it. I mean getting rid of older policies, introducing things like TIF for that very east side corridor, the whole nine yards. Fast forward to today, and there are buildings built down that corridor with giant footprints. And some people even think they are beautiful. So we congratulated ourselves. Then something strange started to happen. Whenever it rained, that very corridor would flood. Odd? It never did that before? Well, we never built like that down that corridor before. Not to worry. The flooding wasn't really that bad. But it's gotten worse and worse. And only now are people starting to realize why those old guys back before and during the Greatest Generation wanted to discourage building anything critical there. Long story short, we're a city situated on a system of five lakes, we can't just look at what everyone else in the nation does and copy them. We need to follow a plan that makes sense for our geography. We need policies that make sense for us, even if on the surface, those policies appear to hamstring us economically. I'm sure Madison is not special in this regard. It's likely most cities have some feature endemic to them that would similarly constrain where and how a wise man would build in that municipality. Like us, most cities have probably even forgotten the why of their constraints. I sympathize. But just as a piece of kindly intended advice from a people who have "been there, done that, currently trying to clean up the mess"... don't look at old policies and say they're "outdated", or "nonsense"... look at old policies and ask, "OK, what was the reason for this?"
- burlesona 8y ago
  Fair, but the root reason for many of the core zoning codes is that the WW2 and Boomer generations felt that cars were the future and that low density car-oriented development was the only kind of thing they wanted to be allowed near them, mostly for aesthetic reasons and also because they perceived (accurately at the beginning) that “those people,” meaning criminals but mostly just low income people, wouldn’t be able to follow, and thus they’d have their idillic suburban life. So when we examine those root causes it turns out that they’re pretty crap and we don’t need to keep them around.

pjc50 8y ago

It seems like the underlying mechanism is https://www.citylab.com/equity/2018/08/ben-carsons-new-argument-against-fair-housing-rules-its-about-nimbys/567449/ https://www.citylab.com/equity/2018/08/ben-carsons-new-argum... , which is a rather different spin.

temp-dude-87844 8y ago

As with most things, engineering a blunt policy solution will lead to unintended consequences. If this proposal goes into effect, by clobbering local zoning codes, anything with sufficient money behind it is going to get built. This typically means projects that optimize for the developer's ability to extract rent from residents: 3 or 4-story apartments with small unit sizes, basic finishes made to aesthetically look high-end, and bare minimum green space or community space. A common approach is to use high-end appliances, a one-time cost, to ask for higher rent. This is the sort of construction that pops up in American suburbia today, where there's sufficient demand, and gets adapted to a more "urban" form with flat roofs and minimal changes. Despite many of these projects being built, there's a price floor beyond which the rent will not drop, because the developer has to make payments on loans and maintain a profit. Therefore, while housing affordability is sure to improve in some places where it's absurdly high, it won't meaningfully be altered in places whose urban form is predominantly suburban. This is doubly so because the plentiful supply of single-family homes offers an a low-cost way to get started as a landlord. Developers also have a choice on where to build. If it's cheaper after expenses to assemble a large parcel in Morgan Hill or Tracy or Vacaville, build out the site, and charge those rents, than to do the same in West Portal, one of them isn't getting built.

joshe 8y ago
The right way to do this is to make sure that a small amount of money will be sufficient. You want to redevelop a one story Sunset place into three stories? Meet the building codes and you are good to go. This would open up development to small contractors and small design/build architects. You wouldn't hire a city fixer + a lawyer + a pr person, you'd just hire an architect and a contractor. Each unit could be built much more cheaply. Right now you could take a $1 million Sunset house and convert it into three $800,000 flats in a wood frame house. Developers would be DELIGHTED to do that. The current system adds 5 years and a million dollars to each redevelopment. Developers don't want to build stuff for rich people, they want return on investment. They are as happy making 10% on affordable housing as making 10% on luxury housing.
sjg007 8y ago
"the plentiful supply of single-family homes" ... huh? the issue is that there is not a plentiful supply of said homes.

joecot 8y ago

> On Aug. 13, Carson proposed requiring that cities that receive federal housing grants reduce their use of exclusionary zoning. Question: is there anything stopping these cities from just deciding to decline federal housing grants? The biggest culprit in this issue is Silicon Valley. Do they really need Federal housing grants to make people want to move there? The issue is too much demand already. If Carson forces the issue, I can absolutely see San Francisco's city leadership just declining grants instead of changing their zoning. That might be enough to get some people voted out, but it'll take a while.

grandmczeb 8y ago
HUD grants are a major source of funding for things like fighting homelessness. The city could decline them, but they would have to make up the difference.
- joecot 8y ago
  Would they though? Are cities required to make up the difference? Problem: cities are artificially keeping housing prices up, pushing lower income people out in favor of the upper class. The housing market is forcing lower income people out of cities. Solution: tell cities they have to stop artificially keeping housing prices up, or the federal government will stop subsidizing low income housing and subsidized loans. If the goal is to gentrify your city and keep prices high, how is that a real threat? That solution is only a threat if you assume these cities aren't paying attention to what's happening at all, and I don't think San Francisco's leaders are that dim.
  - grandmczeb 8y ago
    There’s a pretty clear political mandate in SF to provide things like healthcare and housing for the homeless, part of which is paid for by HUD. If a large chunk of that budget went away, I doubt voters would want to cut services, so the city would have to make it up themselves.
  - bluGill 8y ago
    It isn't just about your city. If the working poor find it advantageous to live your city for one half way across the state that is less people to work the lower income jobs - now it is more expensive to get the toilets cleaned in the office. This raises your cost of living, and lowers it in the other city. Of course how this all works out is very complex and messy and will take dozens of years before we see anything significant.

specialp 8y ago

I live on Long Island, and it is expensive. Schools are funded mostly through high property taxes. It is nearly impossible to get high density housing approved for working age people. The constituents want only 55+ for complexes so they can reap the school tax benefits without more students. So this in effect keeps affordable housing out as developers either build 3000+ sq foot "luxury homes" or 55+ communities.

lxmorj 8y ago
Oh, smart move! Never thought of using that strategy to get advantaged school funding.

afpx 8y ago

One thing to note is that it’s the land itself that appreciates. The housing built on top of it generally doesn’t. That is, structures generally depreciate unless labor and material costs rise significantly. So, why not cap the profits that can be gained from squatting on land? Or increase taxes on under-utilized land? Then, wouldn’t land owners have incentive to build more housing?

rpedela 8y ago
Maybe that would help in less developed areas, but I doubt it would work in a place like Boulder, CO. Boulder rent just keeps getting more and more expensive. There are several reasons for this but most of the land is being used already. Changing zoning laws to have more mixed residential, office, and retail would probably help.
darksaints 8y ago
Density-restrictive zoning increases our demand for land. I, for example, only need about 1000sf of living space. In city where the minimum lot size is 3000sf and maximum FAR is 30%, my demand for land is 3000sf. However, in a city where 12 story buildings are abundant, my demand for land is only about 100sf, including proportionally allocated common area space. By not allowing dense housing, city zoning codes are making affordability illegal by statute.

pessimizer 8y ago

I looked for an explanation of "exclusionary zoning" in the article, but I guess it just means "zoning." It's always great when an administration can repurpose unimplemented legislation designed to reduce segregation, and use it to enrich property speculators.

mikevp 8y ago

Interesting... At first, I thought nominating Carson for head of HUD was a very strange choice. He's a neurosurgeon. Why??? But then... He was Director of Pediatric Neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins, so he had some administrative experience. Then, I realized that Ben Carson has one bit of very relevant life experience that no other HUD director has ever had: He grew up in The Projects. I thought then that that might lead to something interesting. Seems I may have been right.