Commercial real estate guy here so I'll just add a few thoughts - There is no such thing as "affordable" housing. It costs $100 to build an apartment building

Commercial real estate guy here so I'll just add a few thoughts - There is no such thing as "affordable" housing. It costs $100 to build an apartment building , and $120 to build an apartment building with nicer amenities, appliances, etc. Concrete, wood, HVAC equipment, roofs, etc. are all going to pretty much cost the same for a project on the same piece of dirt. It's not going to be a $30 vs $120 difference like I imagine some people think. - Time is money. Imagine you bought a landsite for $5M to build 100 units. Your $3M loan is 8% a year, full recourse repayment guarantee. There are an almost infinite reasons you can be delayed (CEQA lawsuits by NIMBYs, cities illegally denying your project, other silly stuff). Of the $2M of equity, you also are paying your investors 12%. So blended together the project costs 10% of $5M or $500k in financing costs. Delayed for 2 years? Great, you need to earn $78k in additional revenue ($780/unit/year or $65/mo in higher rents) to maintain the same level of profitability. The math is $1M x 5.5% (developer required yield on project cost) = $55k of NOI / 70% of NOI margin to gross up to $78k of revenue. Oh and by the way, since you got delayed 2 years, construction costs went up 10% annually. Hope you got close enough to get a guaranteed max price contract from your G.C. And those hard costs make up 70% of the project costs. - Are you anti-immigrant and complain about housing costs? You're also part of the problem. We need more laborers to build. - Unfortunately eliminating parking requirements won't help too much. Every developer in most major cities know most tenants need to drive somewhere. The cool urban mixed-use redevelopment with no parking is the edge-case. Also, your construction lender will not want to lend money on no-parking projects. But anyways, the market should determine what's the appropriate amount of parking. - We need to supercharge our mass rail infrastructure investments. Even though I believe we should be adding density, we need infrastructure that other international cities have figured out already. Subways work and make cities awesome. We should have been doing this 20 years ago. Congestion is a real issue, to the credit of NIMBYs. - Yes zoning is a massive issue. - Prop 13 and rent control cause the same negative externalities that hide the true cost of living determined by real market values.