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Comment by heurist | Hacker News Reader

We need to reduce zoning/land use restrictions and reduce the concentration of wealth which prevents the middle class from building small, dense housing/mixed-use developments to live/work/rent from. The wealth concentration only allows large capital investors to develop housing projects and they like feeling big so they build big things that the average (up to 90-99%) American has no chance of ever owning. When the middle class can't own or develop productive real estate they have to pay rent, move more frequently, and more easily lose touch with their community. When real estate is forced into the boom-bust cycle of the capital markets everything gets built in waves and then later falls apart all at the same time, straining local economies. Small, organic development spaced across decades is still the best option.

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> We need to reduce zoning/land use restrictions and reduce the concentration of wealth which prevents the middle class from building small, dense housing/mixed-use developments to live/work/rent from.

Agree with 99% of your post, but these two ideas contradict each other.

Zoning/land use restrictions are things that lower the concentration of wealth (they literally cap the wealth of a parcel of land).

When you reduce/eliminate zoning controls, you will increase concentration of wealth, because the value of that land is now allowed to rise as high as private capital will allow it -- higher than it could have ever risen before. (This can be seen by the cities in the US currently reducing/eliminating their zoning).

Part of the argument in the article, I think, is that cities are only relaxing zoning restrictions in a limited area, in their dense urban cores. If the entire city is under a high level of demand, but the ability to meet that demand is concentrated only on a small area where zoning has been liberalized, then that leads to a situation where reducing zoning (in a small area) leads to increased concentration of wealth.

If the entire urban area were allowed to incrementally and organically build to market demand, then land value would not be so concentrated in the core.

> , is that cities are only relaxing zoning restrictions in a limited area, in their dense urban cores.

That's also a thing too, but I'm referring to the trend of cities to remove zoning city-wide, all at once.

I doubt there’s any more or less concentration of wealth either way. The question is whether it concentrates to preexisting homeowners or to the new productive industry and its imported workers.

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