Social Housing in the United States [pdf]
peoplespolicyproject.org
peoplespolicyproject.org
a) Housing is, at the limit, a positional good.
b) Construction costs are crazy, e.g. https://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/news/2018/04/26/con... and not just in the bay area, I spent a bunch of time looking this up with a focus on NYC and they were in the 400k+ price per unit range there.
c) Construction costs go up as density increases, particularly once you need to install an elevator.
d) NIMBYs/zoning/permitting costs.
As I see it, the insane costs associated with building new housing is why we're only getting "luxury" apartments - you just can't make any money because of the high costs.
So where does that leave us? IMO it means we need better transit, but at least for the NYC subway construction costs are insane, and we need a way to build things more cheaply.
I have my own pet idea in modular housing being promising for bringing down construction costs, but fundamentally it is an operational, not policy problem.
And I don't think anyone really has a solution for NIMBYism besides overriding them at a state level, which has not been very effective so far.
Density only actually needs to be very high for a very, very tiny fraction of land. In SF, for instance, something like 80% of the land is zoned exclusively for single-family homes. You don't need elevators nor steel-frame construction to build 3-4 units where there previously was 1. A very substantial amount of inexpensive housing can be built where zoning currently disallows it. As you said though, transit becomes the next bottleneck.
Yes, but the discussion about housing isn't "there is no affordable housing anywhere", but rather "there is no affordable housing near jobs and people have to commute very far", so I'm not sure there is a tonne of daylight between these two.
I feel you on the zoning issue, there is plenty of space that should be upzoned, but I don't think that this line is true: "A very substantial amount of inexpensive housing can be built where zoning currently disallows it."
Land costs are high, Permitting costs and fees are high, and construction costs themselves are very high atm, even if you're not putting in elevators or steel frame construction you're going to have very high costs that you can't recoup from low income renters.
Maybe if you introduced a land tax that made it expensive to have unimproved single family homes you could get somewhere, but as it is I don't think SF has the balance sheet to just spend its way out of this problem right now.
But even then, I think this is a problem that will take decades to resolve, since SF has gotten itself into a chicken & egg situation where everything is expensive because everything else is expensive.