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I'm seeing this in my area too. But I wasn't seeing it ten or fifteen years ago when these debates first came onto my radar. What it looks like to me is a succe

I'm seeing this in my area too. But I wasn't seeing it ten or fifteen years ago when these debates first came onto my radar. What it looks like to me is a success story of identifying a problem and working toward improvement, but simultaneously far more slowly than the proponents of the solutions want and far more quickly than opponents want. A decade ago, YIMBY-leaning people and groups were mad but mostly obscure and NIMBY-leaning people and groups were powerful. Now both sides are mad, the YIMBY side because it is still taking a long time to build enough to see affordability improve (especially with the interest rate shock), and the NIMBY side because they can see all those new townhomes and apartments going up in suburbs and smaller towns and densification projects in the city center, and dislike that. I remember I used to complain that housing was so expensive and you never saw anything getting built despite there being plenty of great places to build things. And then one day I realized that a lot of construction was happening in a lot of those places I was thinking of, and I should stop complaining, since what I wanted to see happen was actually happening! It's hard to feel like it's "better" for both sides to be mad while affordability is still bad, but I do think it's better than what seemed more like an insurmountable problem to me a decade ago.

tpmoney 3y ago
I feel like this is what you'd expect to happen though right? Just from a base intuition on major societal shifts, you'd expect housing prices and availability to outstrip the local ability to afford them. You'd then expect mounting pressure to see more housing built to reduce the rate of price increase and raise the amount of supply. You'd then expect to see developers start making plans and getting the necessary approvals and permits. Finally after all of that happens you'd expect to see stuff start going up. And you'd expect this whole process to probably take something close to a decade to play out wouldn't you? My company just built a brand new HQ, in the middle of a big field. It was a 3+ year process from the moment it was announced, and I have to figure it was another year before that in the planning. I wouldn't really expect that building huge tracts of housing, whether in the middle of downtown, or out in the suburbs would be a much shorter timeline. You have all the permitting and planning to go through, land acquisition, infrastructure improvements / agreements to improve as part of the construction depending on your local setup, public hearings if any zoning changes are required, and then the inevitable delays that come with massive projects like that. And you'd expect all of this to happen in a slow ramp, starting with one project by one developer and expanding as demand continues to climb.
- sanderjd 3y ago
  Yep! None of what I said was meant as a disagreement with any of this :) I mean, I might wish that going from "wait a minute, nobody can afford to live here because lots of people have moved here and we haven't been building any housing" to seeing the first improvements in affordability would require less than like 20 years, but in reality, yeah, things take time.

tpmoney 3y ago

I feel like this is what you'd expect to happen though right? Just from a base intuition on major societal shifts, you'd expect housing prices and availability to outstrip the local ability to afford them. You'd then expect mounting pressure to see more housing built to reduce the rate of price increase and raise the amount of supply. You'd then expect to see developers start making plans and getting the necessary approvals and permits. Finally after all of that happens you'd expect to see stuff start going up. And you'd expect this whole process to probably take something close to a decade to play out wouldn't you? My company just built a brand new HQ, in the middle of a big field. It was a 3+ year process from the moment it was announced, and I have to figure it was another year before that in the planning. I wouldn't really expect that building huge tracts of housing, whether in the middle of downtown, or out in the suburbs would be a much shorter timeline. You have all the permitting and planning to go through, land acquisition, infrastructure improvements / agreements to improve as part of the construction depending on your local setup, public hearings if any zoning changes are required, and then the inevitable delays that come with massive projects like that. And you'd expect all of this to happen in a slow ramp, starting with one project by one developer and expanding as demand continues to climb.

sanderjd 3y ago
Yep! None of what I said was meant as a disagreement with any of this :) I mean, I might wish that going from "wait a minute, nobody can afford to live here because lots of people have moved here and we haven't been building any housing" to seeing the first improvements in affordability would require less than like 20 years, but in reality, yeah, things take time.