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Comment by jseliger | Hacker News Reader

The comments here are so far not good. The big problem in Seattle, as in many other U.S. coastal cities, is zoning, which prohibits the supply of housing to rise to meet demand. See my post, "Do millennials have a future in Seattle? Do millennials have a future in any superstar cities?" (https://jakeseliger.com/2015/09/24/do-millennials-have-a-fut...) or "Zoning's Steep Price" (http://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/serials/files/re...) for more detail.

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Yeah, everyone loves to blame zoning, though in practice, developers are only really enthusiastic about building as long as prices are high and rising. When that stops, they walk away. Plus, there's never enough to meet demand: as long as people are moving into the area because there's money to be made there, and money keeps flowing in, there will always be more demand than supply.

And, I would wager that there's a correlation between those who say there should be no limits on building, and those who are unwilling to pay for public infrastructure (schools, roads, transit systems, water and electric supply, etc.) needed to support the increased population.

Tokyo has consistently grown faster than any other first world megacity for over 30 years now, feeding off of its status as pretty much the only place in the country that hasn't had stagnated economic growth. And despite this growth (housing units growing at >2% per year every year, compared to 0.3% for Seattle which is one of the fastest growth rates of any city in the US), housing prices have remained flat for 30 years now. Developers don't 'walk away' because prices are low...they are forced to compete to survive and they deal with the low prices.

The problem really is supply, and japanese zoning is objectively better for housing costs. Anybody who thinks that it is impossible for supply to keep up with boom time demand has no idea how much housing that developers are willing to build if we just fucking let them.

Tokyo also has decent transportation from the suburbs. The area available in the suburbs grows proportionally to the square of the radius. If people can commute to some city from 80 km away as efficiently as people elsewhere travel to another city from 20 km away, that effectively creates sixteen times the available area for the same convenience with regard to work proximity.

Thank you for voicing this view, it seems at odds with the conclusion of the gp (which is interesting too, and the consensus here at HN when this sort of issue comes up).

I've been thinking about this for a while, and I would really like to see the evidence for your view. What are the cities that have begun to suffer for lack of zoning (in this context, or otherwise)? Is this a modern problem? Is there a textbook example?

Google suggests Houston has a lack of zoning; interesting, but clearly it has been able to grow via sprawl.

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