4 ms·

Municipalities all over the world refusing to build enough housing (and hotel space) is what's pricing people out. These are all pretty simple problems to solve

Municipalities all over the world refusing to build enough housing (and hotel space) is what's pricing people out. These are all pretty simple problems to solve but there's fractal resistance to making enough room. In New York we built like 100k new units in the 2010s but we grew by 500k people and still, the default position of people who theoretically advocate for cheaper housing is to block new development.

ethanbond 3y ago
Both are problems
the_lego 3y ago
This is like proposing to dig a bigger basement to fit more flood water. No matter how much you dig, there will always be more water in the ocean to flow in. In the case of New York, it will never have "enough" housing - what will instead happen is, eventually, it will become so overgrown that it will be unattractive for new arrivals.
- fragmede 3y ago
  Where it's the people that attract new arrivals, you may not want to move there, but there are plenty of people who do. Look at world class cities filled with skyscrapers (or even those not), they're still growing, not shrinking.
brightball 3y ago
I wonder what it would take to just start forming new towns? You don't hear much about that anymore.
- marssaxman 3y ago
  Where would you put them? Every habitable corner of the globe has people living in it already.
  - supportengineer 3y ago
    Leading to San Francisco you can drive on a freeway for almost 50 miles and see practically zero houses on either side of the road.
  - baggy_trough 3y ago
    That is not anywhere close to the truth.
    - marssaxman 3y ago
      I suppose you are technically correct in that there are national parks and other wilderness areas we could choose to destroy, but that provides a pretty obvious answer to the previous question.
      - baggy_trough 3y ago
        New towns could be placed on, for example, farmland. There isn't any reason that a town has to use completely empty and undeveloped land. There is also an abundance of habitable land with nobody living there or using it, as a road trip around North America will attest.
        marssaxman 3y ago
        My experience road-tripping around North America has shown me exactly the opposite: there are people living everywhere it is feasible to live, and then some. Anywhere there is water, there are people drinking it; anywhere there is flattish ground with any amount of water that can be piped in, there are people farming it; anywhere there are trees, people are logging them; anywhere there is grass, cows are grazing it. If land has no people, there is always some good reason nobody wants to live there. My experience is biased toward the west side of the continent; perhaps things are different elsewhere.
        baggy_trough 3y ago
        I guess we just see different things. I see extended areas of low and no intensity usage. So much so that I would say that the amount of space in the United States that is available for expansion, if needed, is close to unlimited. Naturally it might not make economic sense to develop there at this time, but that could change with regulatory/legal changes or by virtue of improved technology or increased population.
- scoofy 3y ago
  When the answer is "just go live somewhere else" that's not really an answer. I've thought a lot about this topic (in the sense of creating car-free cities in america), and it is technically feasible, but only if some benevolent billionaire were basically able to find some viable place, and build an entire city in place, and then create a deal with major employers to move their offices there, somehow fund the relocation of people who have already built a life for themselves elsewhere, and are already high up in these companies with homes and counter-incentives from moving elsewhere, and then somehow getting other people without any economic incentive to also move there. At the end of the day it's a pie-in-the-sky fantasy. Unless you're trying to court people who already have too much money to worry about housing prices (think Celebration, FL), then there is far, far too much cost and risk involved to do it. There is also a graveyard of failed attempts (see: California City, CA). The reason why this crisis happened is exactly that we have stopped allowing organic city growth from happening. Fixed-zoning is the problem, and does not allow for incremental growth. That the crisis didn't happen in the 60's is only because the proliferation of the automobile allowed cities to expand outward, but that outward expansion has a limit (when highway capacity is breached in such a way where commuting from exurban distances is completely unfeasible), and we hit that limit around the late 90's, when we saw the first housing crisis.
  - seanmcdirmid 3y ago
    Why isn’t “go live somewhere else” a part of the answer though? We can’t all live in one or even the few most popular cities. That’s obviously not going to work, so some mechanism is needed to regulate who lives where, in the USA that mechanism is mostly market based. Even in Tokyo, a city mostly touted as one with minimal zoning, housing is still pricey (by Japanese standards) with standards at the low end many Americans wouldn’t accept (although I think we need more low end housing like this in the USA). And most of Japan’s young people want to live in Tokyo, it’s obvious not all of those who want to live there can.
    - scoofy 3y ago
      Because "go live somewhere else" is unsustainable in the long run. You have to remember that the time-scale of this crisis is literally just one parent-to-child generation. All of these zoning laws were passed when the boomers were in their prime home-buying age range ('60s-'70s), and the crisis is occurring now simply because their children have effectively nowhere to live. It's only politically feasible when the folks you're telling to live somewhere else are a political minority, and, to be honest, until the last few years, that's been the the only response. Now that millennials are becoming the dominant political force, it's just not going to fly. In cities in California they are literally creating company town-style housing for educators and other jobs that cities cannot afford to compensate with enough money to afford housing. Anyone who isn't directly benefiting from the system can trivially understand how inefficient and absurd it is, but the fact is that people who are benefiting from the system are wildly over-represented in terms of active voters. That's obviously changing.
happytoexplain 3y ago
You make it sound like the opposition to expansion don't know that there is housing demand in their areas - that the solution is "simple" and they are just dummies. But this feels kind of dishonest. There is a conflict between people who want to live in an area and people who don't want that area to become overcrowded (and then there's the myriad of second-order problems that stem from those two outcomes). That's the problem statement in a nutshell, and it's unfortunately complex both logistically and emotionally (and therefore politically, too), which is a disastrous combination. One of the hallmarks of that combination is that each side at even the highest levels of discourse tend to exhibit very little respect for the other (no sympathy, no benefit of the doubt, etc). One of the few things both sides should be able to agree on is that it's awful when wealthy outsiders start buying property.
- weeksie 3y ago
  Sorry, that is a very narrow point of view that's only popular as of relatively recently. People who block housing in cities because they don't want the cities to be "overcrowded" are ridiculous because: 1. Cities are by definition dense areas 2. If you don't want to live somewhere dense, move where fewer people want to live 3. Your right to your own property doesn't extend past it 4. You are destroying productivity and allowing landlords to extract excess productivity from the whole population, so the effect is almost definitely not the one that you think it is. For smaller communities in ecologically fragile areas, there are more nuanced arguments, but even then those people should prefer managed density because: 1. Density keeps sprawl at bay and is better for the environment 2. Residents won't be able to afford to live on their little patch unless they own the land 3. Even then their area will become a museum around them and they certainly won't be able to preserve the idyll they wish to. In any case, most of the supply problems can be solved without major changes to what people often refer to as "neighborhood character". Everything from ADUs to just allowing a few extra stories does quite a bit to increase the capacity of an urban area.
- scoofy 3y ago
  This is exactly the perspective of folks that aren't feeling the pain from the housing crisis (and are in fact benefiting from it). >There is a conflict between people who want to live in an area and people who don't want that area to become overcrowded Yes. Obviously. >That's the problem statement in a nutshell, and it's unfortunately complex both logistically and emotionally (and therefore politically, too), which is a disastrous combination. This is already a bipartisan issue. You can see folks like Darrell Owens arguing for it on the far-left, Ezra Klein from a moderate-left position, and Chuck Marohn arguing for changes on the right. It's only disastrous if your goal is to preserve the status quo of low density (sub)urban housing in the face of massive inequality in this housing costs. This is a classic scenario of a political minority (non-homeowners) facing a ton of pain that is trivially politically solvable, but not being able to do anything about it unless they become they eventually become the political majority... and now they are. And, more importantly, this scenario is does not lead to mean-reversion. We are in the middle of a political cascade. As the millennials become the dominant voting demographic, we should expect the pendulum to accelerate rapidly in the other direction... and that's exactly what we are seeing. For those homeowners who are suddenly feeling uncomfortable about the political winds on this topic... buckle up. If this is really a cascade (and I think it's obvious that it is), we should expect these changes to accelerate for the foreseeable future. I believe it would be prudent start planning for the changes instead of fighting them.

ethanbond 3y ago

Both are problems

the_lego 3y ago

This is like proposing to dig a bigger basement to fit more flood water. No matter how much you dig, there will always be more water in the ocean to flow in. In the case of New York, it will never have "enough" housing - what will instead happen is, eventually, it will become so overgrown that it will be unattractive for new arrivals.

fragmede 3y ago
Where it's the people that attract new arrivals, you may not want to move there, but there are plenty of people who do. Look at world class cities filled with skyscrapers (or even those not), they're still growing, not shrinking.

brightball 3y ago

I wonder what it would take to just start forming new towns? You don't hear much about that anymore.

marssaxman 3y ago
Where would you put them? Every habitable corner of the globe has people living in it already.
- supportengineer 3y ago
  Leading to San Francisco you can drive on a freeway for almost 50 miles and see practically zero houses on either side of the road.
- baggy_trough 3y ago
  That is not anywhere close to the truth.
  - marssaxman 3y ago
    I suppose you are technically correct in that there are national parks and other wilderness areas we could choose to destroy, but that provides a pretty obvious answer to the previous question.
    - baggy_trough 3y ago
      New towns could be placed on, for example, farmland. There isn't any reason that a town has to use completely empty and undeveloped land. There is also an abundance of habitable land with nobody living there or using it, as a road trip around North America will attest.
      - marssaxman 3y ago
        My experience road-tripping around North America has shown me exactly the opposite: there are people living everywhere it is feasible to live, and then some. Anywhere there is water, there are people drinking it; anywhere there is flattish ground with any amount of water that can be piped in, there are people farming it; anywhere there are trees, people are logging them; anywhere there is grass, cows are grazing it. If land has no people, there is always some good reason nobody wants to live there. My experience is biased toward the west side of the continent; perhaps things are different elsewhere.
        baggy_trough 3y ago
        I guess we just see different things. I see extended areas of low and no intensity usage. So much so that I would say that the amount of space in the United States that is available for expansion, if needed, is close to unlimited. Naturally it might not make economic sense to develop there at this time, but that could change with regulatory/legal changes or by virtue of improved technology or increased population.
scoofy 3y ago
When the answer is "just go live somewhere else" that's not really an answer. I've thought a lot about this topic (in the sense of creating car-free cities in america), and it is technically feasible, but only if some benevolent billionaire were basically able to find some viable place, and build an entire city in place, and then create a deal with major employers to move their offices there, somehow fund the relocation of people who have already built a life for themselves elsewhere, and are already high up in these companies with homes and counter-incentives from moving elsewhere, and then somehow getting other people without any economic incentive to also move there. At the end of the day it's a pie-in-the-sky fantasy. Unless you're trying to court people who already have too much money to worry about housing prices (think Celebration, FL), then there is far, far too much cost and risk involved to do it. There is also a graveyard of failed attempts (see: California City, CA). The reason why this crisis happened is exactly that we have stopped allowing organic city growth from happening. Fixed-zoning is the problem, and does not allow for incremental growth. That the crisis didn't happen in the 60's is only because the proliferation of the automobile allowed cities to expand outward, but that outward expansion has a limit (when highway capacity is breached in such a way where commuting from exurban distances is completely unfeasible), and we hit that limit around the late 90's, when we saw the first housing crisis.
- seanmcdirmid 3y ago
  Why isn’t “go live somewhere else” a part of the answer though? We can’t all live in one or even the few most popular cities. That’s obviously not going to work, so some mechanism is needed to regulate who lives where, in the USA that mechanism is mostly market based. Even in Tokyo, a city mostly touted as one with minimal zoning, housing is still pricey (by Japanese standards) with standards at the low end many Americans wouldn’t accept (although I think we need more low end housing like this in the USA). And most of Japan’s young people want to live in Tokyo, it’s obvious not all of those who want to live there can.
  - scoofy 3y ago
    Because "go live somewhere else" is unsustainable in the long run. You have to remember that the time-scale of this crisis is literally just one parent-to-child generation. All of these zoning laws were passed when the boomers were in their prime home-buying age range ('60s-'70s), and the crisis is occurring now simply because their children have effectively nowhere to live. It's only politically feasible when the folks you're telling to live somewhere else are a political minority, and, to be honest, until the last few years, that's been the the only response. Now that millennials are becoming the dominant political force, it's just not going to fly. In cities in California they are literally creating company town-style housing for educators and other jobs that cities cannot afford to compensate with enough money to afford housing. Anyone who isn't directly benefiting from the system can trivially understand how inefficient and absurd it is, but the fact is that people who are benefiting from the system are wildly over-represented in terms of active voters. That's obviously changing.

happytoexplain 3y ago

You make it sound like the opposition to expansion don't know that there is housing demand in their areas - that the solution is "simple" and they are just dummies. But this feels kind of dishonest. There is a conflict between people who want to live in an area and people who don't want that area to become overcrowded (and then there's the myriad of second-order problems that stem from those two outcomes). That's the problem statement in a nutshell, and it's unfortunately complex both logistically and emotionally (and therefore politically, too), which is a disastrous combination. One of the hallmarks of that combination is that each side at even the highest levels of discourse tend to exhibit very little respect for the other (no sympathy, no benefit of the doubt, etc). One of the few things both sides should be able to agree on is that it's awful when wealthy outsiders start buying property.

weeksie 3y ago
Sorry, that is a very narrow point of view that's only popular as of relatively recently. People who block housing in cities because they don't want the cities to be "overcrowded" are ridiculous because: 1. Cities are by definition dense areas 2. If you don't want to live somewhere dense, move where fewer people want to live 3. Your right to your own property doesn't extend past it 4. You are destroying productivity and allowing landlords to extract excess productivity from the whole population, so the effect is almost definitely not the one that you think it is. For smaller communities in ecologically fragile areas, there are more nuanced arguments, but even then those people should prefer managed density because: 1. Density keeps sprawl at bay and is better for the environment 2. Residents won't be able to afford to live on their little patch unless they own the land 3. Even then their area will become a museum around them and they certainly won't be able to preserve the idyll they wish to. In any case, most of the supply problems can be solved without major changes to what people often refer to as "neighborhood character". Everything from ADUs to just allowing a few extra stories does quite a bit to increase the capacity of an urban area.
scoofy 3y ago
This is exactly the perspective of folks that aren't feeling the pain from the housing crisis (and are in fact benefiting from it). >There is a conflict between people who want to live in an area and people who don't want that area to become overcrowded Yes. Obviously. >That's the problem statement in a nutshell, and it's unfortunately complex both logistically and emotionally (and therefore politically, too), which is a disastrous combination. This is already a bipartisan issue. You can see folks like Darrell Owens arguing for it on the far-left, Ezra Klein from a moderate-left position, and Chuck Marohn arguing for changes on the right. It's only disastrous if your goal is to preserve the status quo of low density (sub)urban housing in the face of massive inequality in this housing costs. This is a classic scenario of a political minority (non-homeowners) facing a ton of pain that is trivially politically solvable, but not being able to do anything about it unless they become they eventually become the political majority... and now they are. And, more importantly, this scenario is does not lead to mean-reversion. We are in the middle of a political cascade. As the millennials become the dominant voting demographic, we should expect the pendulum to accelerate rapidly in the other direction... and that's exactly what we are seeing. For those homeowners who are suddenly feeling uncomfortable about the political winds on this topic... buckle up. If this is really a cascade (and I think it's obvious that it is), we should expect these changes to accelerate for the foreseeable future. I believe it would be prudent start planning for the changes instead of fighting them.