Reforming land use regulations
brookings.edu
brookings.edu
But (if there was no 'but' why even comment?) I think it's also important to not throw the baby out with the bathwater. There's a case[0] ongoing in Ontario wherein the premise is basically "conservation authorities don't have the right to tell me what to do with my land". But those same regulations are the ones that have helped prevent major flooding throughout the province for the last 60 years. Some regulations aren't just there for NIMBYism- some are there to prevent the tragedy of the commons.
It's important to recognize the difference.
[0] - http://canadianjusticereviewboard.ca/articles-caselaw/case-l...
I have a hard time seeing tax payers supporting tax increases simply to implement more bureaucracy, in the name of giving land owners more opportunities to make money.
For example, building affordable apartments often requires finding "loopholes" and squeezing something through the regulatory process before it gets shut down.
If I may quote at length from the Seattle times[0]:
> It was the brainchild of the late Bellevue developer Jim Potter, who found a loophole in Seattle’s building regulations.
> At the time, the city allowed up to eight unrelated people to live in one “dwelling” with a shared kitchen. The code didn’t say the rooms had to be tied together as a single unit, so Potter built a cross between an apartment building and a boardinghouse, where someone could rent a sleeping room as small as 100 square feet with a private bath and share a kitchen with up to seven others renters.
> A micro-housing building spree ensued that gave Seattle more such units than any city in the country. At last count, 782 micro-housing units were cleared for occupancy in Seattle, with another 1,598 units in the pipeline. No other American city comes close.
> Once the pipeline is cleared, though, no future Potter-style hybrids will be allowed: The city changed the rules in October after neighbors railed against the projects. Congregate housing — group housing arrangements such as dorms and senior housing that use common areas — is still allowed. But in the future, micro-housing will mean efficiency apartments of at least 220 square feet, each with its own bath and kitchen.
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I'd argue that on the whole, more people are harmed by heavy-handed regulations that limit the mark
I know regulations contain more than just "affordable housing" issues, but often the impact of land use regulation is to drive up the cost of housing for everyone, which makes households more sensitive to job loss, and dependent upon a steady income.
The 2007-2008 recession could have been partially mitigated if inexpensive housing stock was available for purchase.
So, I'd argue that preventing major flooding is good, but the tools by which governments try to prevent that flooding (and other "negative externalities" cause problems more severe than they solve.)
[0] http://www.seattletimes.com/pacific-nw-magazine/seattles-mic... [1] https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/4/20/the-high-high-...
2,000+ families living around Bellevue (a suburb of Seattle, not even Seattle proper) doesn't sound great to me. Seattle isn't known for being a great place to spend your day in the park... Seems to me more like a scam to sell more homes at the cost of the city.
Short of a Constitutional amendment, a city can only decide how to house new residents once they arrive. Do they move into new units alongside existing residents, or do they displace those with lower income? Do the new beds cram illegally into existing bedrooms, or do the buildings get taller?
If blocking housing construction were an effective way of preventing immigration, that would be one thing. Instead we are all suffering crowded conditions and long commutes because you have cause and effect backwards. Housing units don't cause residents, and the absence of housing units doesn't prevent residents! Residents would, absent your intervention, cause housing units.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_movement_under_Unit...
This is plainly false. You don't need much space to have a hot plate / microwave / small refrigerator (for food preparation and eating), a desk (where someone can put a laptop and entertain themselves / work), and some small amount of empty floor for storage.
I could do much more than just "sleep" in a 150 square foot unit -- in fact, I'd gladly spend most of my time inside doing any of {sleeping, working, eating, watching stuff on laptop, playing games}. Many other people could as well, and I am sure that most of those people would gladly pay less for rent in exchange for living in such housing.
To make what would otherwise be safe (with working sprinklers it's safe -- much safer than most housing in the US, in fact!) and serviceable housing illegal does not serve the interests of anyone -- especially not those who are poor.
No one is against affordable housing. But people are often so desperate for housing that they'll 'choose' to take unsafe / unsanitary / unlivable conditions, such as the tenements some people are pushing as a "solution" to housing. People having to resort to these conditions makes everyone's lives worse (both the residents, and the city with which these residents interact in).
This looks exactly like the "tragedy of the commons" the parent poster warned about, and a good use of regulation to prevent that abuse. For the same reason you can't sell a car without seatbelts and airbags, Seattle has prevented the new construction of tenements. That's a win for everyone. Real apartments will get built instead, ones that are still super small, but are actually safe and livable.
They live 10-15 people to a 2-bedroom apartment.
They live in buildings not meant to be dwellings, off the books, out of reach of building inspectors and fire code (see: Oakland Ghost Ship).
They live (and piss and shit and shoot up and overdose) on the street, the public transit system, the library, the parks.
None of these things are safe, sanitary, or livable, and the negative externalities to the public are enormous.
It's a maddening fallacy when talking about housing construction that you can prevent prevent poverty (or tech workers, for that matter) from existing by prohibiting the kind of housing that you think poor people (or techies) would live in.
No obviously not. But that doesn't mean we should encourage tenements either.
There are still hungry/starving people on the street, but we don't eliminate the FDA and let companies sell tainted meat and dairy to "solve" that problem.
Part of living in modern society is some basic minimum standards of quality and safety. Obviously those can be abused, but Seattle simply isn't doing that. 220sqft is a totally reasonable minimum. Requiring every unit have at least a bathroom and a non-bathroom sink is a totally reasonable minimum.
> It's a maddening fallacy when talking about housing construction that you can prevent prevent poverty from existing by prohibiting the kind of housing...
Your inventing this fallacy. No one seriously thinks banning tenements will solve homelessness.
The goal of banning tenements is to prevent companies from exploiting people and profiting from them -- building tenements actually takes society away from the solution, by wasting land and money that could have been spent on housing.
We could house everyone, we have the technology, we have the capital. Requiring that housing to be safe simply is not an impediment to that goal in any way.
Requiring working fire sprinklers, smoke alarms, and functional electrics and plumbing is about quality and safety. A building with wiring that threatens to cause a fire or one with leaky plumbing that feeds toxic moulds is indeed a safety hazard, just as is tainted meat/dairy. However, minimum square-footage requirements / occupancy limits do not fall into "quality and safety" and only serve to increase the minimum cost of housing.
By mandating a certain level of luxury (and thus, of cost), the only effect is to make sure that people who can't afford it will end up homeless (or illegally subletting, squatting, or some other black-market, unsafe option). It's crucial to note that there is no backpressure mechanism at work here -- reducing housing options for people with the least money will not cause the construction of housing that meets those standards. Mandating luxury does not work without mandating supply as well. Such zoning laws ended SROs and rooming houses (by prohibiting any new construction) and such drastic reductions in the cheapest housing options, of course, caused homelessness crises.
> The goal of banning tenements is to prevent companies from exploiting people and profiting from them -- building tenements actually takes society away from the solution, by wasting land and money that could have been spent on housing.
Yes. Land-owners indeed inherently "profit" from people, as owning land lets them charge rents. But beyond that -- reducing zoning restrictions and occupancy limitations would increase the supply of low-end housing and thus decrease the market power of slumlords (by increasing competition). Giving renters available options they can afford lets them have the option of exit from their current renting situation.
> We could house everyone, we have the technology, we have the capital.
We indeed could, and it's a goal I support. However, creating a minimum standard for luxury of housing units without mandating supply will not get us there. I use the word "luxury" intentionally here -- from the perspective of someone who has had to sleep in homeless shelters, a dry room big enough for a bed and with a door that locks (for which one has the only key) is serviceable housing. To quote Paul Groth,
> a good hotel room of 150 square feet—dry space, perhaps with a bath or a room sink, cold and sometimes hot water, enough electric service to run a 60-watt bulb and a television, central heat, and access to telephones and other services—constitutes a living unit mechanically more luxuriant than those lived in by a third to a half of the population of the earth. As Dolores Hayden reminds us, many of the world's people would consider an American two-car garage an excellent dwelling in its own right.
Why should we prevent "exploitation" when the state of being exploited is optimal for its victims, and for society?
For whatever warm fuzzies society feels for having washed its hands of the situation, everyone is worse off for having a population afflicted by homelessness rather than merely substandard housing.
I generally agree with this article that many land use regulations have restricted building and it has generally hurt all of us. I'm all for density, and one of the ways in which we could increase density is with 'better' land use controls, not fewer or more or whatever. Regulation should not be thought of as a scalar.
Sounds a lot like "a more nuanced discussion" to me.
The article ignores the market dynamics of real-estate development. Those dynamics are created by the the limited fungibility of real property. Real property may be exchanged for cash, but following such a transaction the cash can not (usually) be used to replace the original property because there is only one property at a particular location.
In general, real-estate development seeks to maximize profits by pushing parcels toward their highest and best use. Removing regulations affecting real-estate entitlement won't change the economics affecting what developers build. Class A office space will be more profitable than a used car lot. A Porsche dealership will be more profitable than a Greyhound station. Luxury apartments will be more profitable than a tenement. Those are what developers will try to build.
Suppose a luxury housing developer controls a parcel, removing entitlement regulations does not mean the developer builds a tenement. It means either the luxury housing developer builds luxury housing or waits until there is demand for luxury housing or someone makes an offer on the parcel that meets the luxury housing developer's expected internal rate of return from developing the property as luxury housing. An affordable housing developer who wants the parcel has to pay the price of a parcel suitable for luxury housing to obtain it. So will another luxury housing developer or an office building developer and for them the price will make more economic sense.
One way of thinking about real-estate is that each and every parcel is a monopoly. Some monopolies are worth more than others. Removing entitlement regulations does not change the value of locations. It does not change the economic incentives of highest and best use. It does not remove market demand.