Rent is falling all over the Southeast where housing has been built in droves, and actually in greater quantities than new demand. The only solution is just flooding the market with housing.
Also I have limited sympathy for people who move to high COL areas and then are upset by housing prices.
*Move to a high CoL area to get a high paying job, and then are upset by housing prices.
Many people would be overall better off with a lower paying job in a lower CoL area
There's no one silver bullet, it will have to be a multi-front push:
1. Just build more
2. Zone for multi-family housing
3. Get rid of minimum parking and minimum lot size requirements
4. Allow mixed-user residential and commercial buildings
5. Shift property tax towards taxing the land and exempting buildings from tax, to force speculators to sell vacant land and derilect buildings for development
6. When things start moving, invest in walkability and public transit to support dense urban cores. Cars are great for low-density, but paying for miles of road and polluted air in dense city cores is silly behavior
Most people don't want to live in dense urban cores, so #5 and #6 can easily backfire and stunt progress on #1.
Just let people decide what to build where, both as individuals and communities. If dense urban cores truly are the "better" way of living, it will prove itself soon enough without the urbanists trying to force everyone down their path to their own detriment.
80% of the US population would disagree. It really seems like you’re applying what you like to the entire population and then assuming that anything else is rubbish.
Having grown up in a rural community, and small towns, I never really want to go back. Dense urban areas are wonderful, I find huge amounts of joy in multiculturalism. The plethora of ideas, language, food, and art is inspiring. I will never get that anywhere except dense urban areas.
Demand vs supply is the crux of the affordability crisis, and the points outlined in the post you’re replying to are all valid and great ways to help increase supply.
And FWIW—- you’re absolutely welcome to enjoy and appreciate sparsely populated areas, but I really think you need to understand the vast majority of people disagree with you. Not because they’re “stuck” in some dense urban area but because they want to be there.
An interesting group of people they are, the super-rich leftists. The way they weaponize the environment to prevent others having what they want... really makes you wonder.
It's some jerk who makes $200k who can afford the house but can't afford to not care what their neighbors do that drives all this.
He's the one trying to scheme up some way to get the government to use other people's tax dollars to threaten them if they try and do something he doesn't like, because that's his only lever to pull. And there's enough of these jerks the government(s) pander to them. The result is everything gets stifled and red-taped. Can't run a bar here. Can't have an apartment building there. Can't have too little parking, but if you have too many cars you're running a junkyard, and on and on and on and on. It's these people in aggregate that result in the existing body of regulation of which there always seem to be a few lines that can block any given development.
And then they have the gall to turn around and whine about the sum total of all this. Not enough housing, not enough amenities, what does get built is ungodly expensive.
"man, this park sure is dirty" <throws cigarette butt on ground> "I wonder how it got that way".
I don't think that the urbanist movement can succeed if it is driven by policy wonks who want to throw out the rulebook and impose reforms from the ivory tower without a real small-d democratic political strategy. Many of us are used to fighting the political battle against climate change by being Absolutely Correct and expecting that Science with her indefatigable armies of Reality will guard the flanks. A fully economic fight like this one just doesn't have the same kind of inevitability. Every step forward on the ground weakens the sense of urgency in the legislature, leading to an equilibrium trap without a vigorous political movement that can hold momentum.
Nerds do not usually want to do politics, but in housing you have to do politics.
It's not a coincidence that the "housing crisis" continues unabated in places like NYC that are losing population, yet appears to be solved in areas in the south that are absorbing those people.
Asymptotically what you said might be true, but before it gets there years might pass as they did in China. It's not clear how long this madness would last if not for COVID.
Even setting that aside, homes per capita is not indicative of supply and demand - if everyone in SF wants to live in a house alone, it really won't matter that SF has slightly more homes per capita.
But I don't think it is a left/right issue. In certain regions it may be the left, in others the right, but generally it is subset of both that have investment in artificial scarcity. It's just the justifications that change depending on ideology.
The whole first part of the article tries to highlight the success of the 1972-era zoning policy, but ends up making the opposite point, whereas agricultural land is preventing enough housing being built in the north of Montgomery County, whereas Virginia has successfully incorporated density (and more jobs as a result).
Not sure if that was author's intention, or how game theory is even relevant here. It's just zoning and housing policy and understanding of the zero-sum dynamic for desirable land. Some other examples from the article don't make much sense either (except Houston).
Source: DMV native for 20+ years, also an economist (by education, not profession).
I suspect the publication paid the author to write a very particular opinion, because the article reads more like a NIMBY-defending piece.
All they do is elect Republican governors who kill our transit projects.
The only way to know what your incentives will do is let them play out. Now, you can make educated guesses on what will happen, but much like computer security, people find surprising ways to break things.
But yes, if you change incentives, you can change behavior. And if you can find a way to create and enforce incentives that push toward an outcome you want, then you get more of that outcome. This is a good lesson to remind people of: incentives matter. So often---especially in discussion of public policy---we see conflation of stated desires with incentives, and of incentives with "cash paid to someone". The former is fallacy, and the latter myopic.
I don't see how this creates a sustainable dynamic, rather than merely making the journey to that same financialization attractor (ie Moloch) a bit more comfortable. Everyone pats themselves on the back about how this church (or that farmland) was given a cash infusion and could keep on running its same cute bespoke non-IREAM (inflation rules everything around me) operation, but what happens when that bolus of cash has been spent (ie inevitably extracted) and they need another one?
It feels like this is the problem with every heady touting of market-based reforms. Of course the initial trend is consensual and both parties benefit (positive sum) - otherwise it wouldn't happen! But then as the feedback loops from market optimization set in over the longer term, those positive qualities gradually disappear in favor of the dystopian nonconsensual dynamic.
(FWIW I'm personally not decided whether the root problem here is that capital inevitably coalesces and therefore government intervention is required to keep it distributed, or whether the agglomerating dynamic stems from the centralized money-printing fountain that flows to the politically connected)
What the government is saying by allowing these rights to be sold, is that the place to which they are transferred to has arbitrarily restrictive zoning. In my mind, the value of transferrable development rights should be zero. Zoning should actually have some hard principle behind it that isn't bendable by allowing the non-development of some other desirable piece of land. Either a building is too tall for the neighborhood or it isn't. It should be "too tall unless you pay a farmer 10 miles away".
Why is uneven, concentrated development some kind of public good?
How does this position unroll? How does the farm eventually get developed in 50 years? Do they have to buy TDR from someone else? Does an "equivalent" TDR have to be demolished?
Because of agglomeration and the incredible desirability of mixed-use walkable neighborhoods (see rents in walkable neighborhoods of NYC + SF + Boston for proof). This farmland is only desirable and sought out by developers because of zoning restrictions elsewhere.
>How does this position unroll? How does the farm eventually get developed in 50 years? Do they have to buy TDR from someone else? Does an "equivalent" TDR have to be demolished?
These are all great questions which reveal that TDRs are not a very forward-looking policy solution to the housing crisis. Maybe planners believe there will be more appetite for taller buildings in the future, or that land prices will rise enough that the owners' support for zoning reform will overcome opposition. It does seem absurd, and more like a way to bribe property owners so that local politicians can avoid making public decisions in meetings that 90% of NIMBY cranks disagree with.
If you can get a payout for "selling" something without having to actually sell any part of your property that you intend on using, and nothing will change in your neighborhood, why wouldn't you sell it? And if property owners and residents in a neighborhood are crying to anyone who will listen that the world will end if four-story buildings give way to six-story buildings, you now have a big incentive to show up to those same land use meetings and push back.
Maybe instead of going around our elbow to get to our asshole we should just call a spade a spade and make rent 'optimization' illegal. Then once people can actually afford a home we'll have a better picture of how many should be built. Because ultimately? People just want to be able to live without the stress of bills and the looming worry of maintaining a roof over their heads.
xnx•1h ago