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It's not really all-or-nothing though; even relieving rent a little bit in these places would represent relief for a large number of people. And upzoning has other benefits. People who own small SFHs and have family struggling to make rent will be able to add ADUs to help house that family. And fundamentally, upzoning is reducing restrictions on peoples' private property which to me seem needless. It sounds hyperbolic or cliche, but why not do it in the name of Freedom?

> If the US was an authoritarian dictatorship and we bulldozed every single family home in the Bay Area

No where in the Bay Area "is built out" so there's no need to bulldoze single family homes. There's lot of parking lots, abandoned or under-utilized malls (e.g. Valco) and land zoned for other uses like office or manufacturing that can be used for new construction.

I'm pretty sure building more alone won't solve the affordability problem, but it will stop prices from rising. As it stands as a software engineer I can't afford rent in the average San Francisco apartment (I live in Oakland, so I'm OK for now).

But that's why many housing advocates support the three Ps: Production, Protection and Preservation. These three ideas combine to build more homes, protect exist tenants from abuses and to preserve existing affordable housing stock such as SROs.

Zoning is not a magic pill for ending the crisis, but we can't even begin to do things like build government subsidized housing when communities spend 20 years battling one apartment building to house 28 families [0].

0: https://twitter.com/LibbySchaaf/status/1128517407486517248?r...

NYC is already relatively affordable compared to the Bay Area despite its massive population, thanks to aggressive upzoming. Sure, Manhattan is expensive but it manages to absorb a ton of people and makes the surrounding areas far more affordable. Contrast with the Bay Area, where anything within reasonable commute time of SF or Silicon Valley is still very expensive.

> "What these type of pieces never discuss is how much they think rents will be brought down by upzoning."

[slighted edited for clarity]

according to some quick and dirty searching, we build about 140,000 units per year in california and need another 110,000 to house the net increase in population. that means we need 250K units per year total. it now costs about $400K to build a unit of housing. so that means we need $100B of new housing per year in cali. incidentally, the gdp is about $3T and the annual state budget is about $200B.

at that rate of building (250K units/year), you'd expect housing prices to stabilize. if you want prices to go down, you'd have to build more than that (hard to incentivize unless costs are brought down or subsidies are brought up).

according to the census, even in metropolitan statistical areas, new residential construction is mostly (90+%) detached single family residences (SFRs). so if we upzone all SFRs (R-1 in LA) to two-family residences (R-2 in LA) and encouraged the building of 2-family structures, we'd expect housing prices to stabilize, at least in metro areas, where housing is at crisis levels.

i think this was the reasoning behind california cities (like pasadena) experimenting with allowing in-law/accessory units (based on the quick calcs above). i would actually go even further and upzone to R-3 (as proposed by scott weiner in SB50 [0]), which would then allow fourplexes on what would only have a single home. fourplexes are nice because the massing (from the street) is about the same as a single family home, but it potentially quadruples density. then you'd actually see decreases in housing costs.

i'd also encourage owner-occupied fourplexes to create more coherent neighborhoods, rather than corporate-controlled rentals that extract and deplete wealth from a neighborhood.

[0] https://www.latimes.com/politics/la-pol-ca-single-family-zon...

> new residential construction is mostly (90+%) detached single family residences

But how much brand new residential construction on vacant plots of land is going on in the most expensive cities? The slightly unrealistic YIMBY movement makes it sound like there's many plots of vacant land just waiting to be developed. But..... there's not. Upzoning mostly means buying existing SFRs and doing teardowns, not just building brand new on these imaginary vacant plots of land in San Fran or Manhattan. This is limited by number of SFR sellers, etc.

i was surprised too. here's where i looked it up: https://www.census.gov/construction/chars/completed.html (specifically the metro data).

not having looked into it further, i'm guessing that most new (SFR) housing starts are at the margins of the metro area, not in/near the center.

> I struggle to find examples of this happening in market economies outside of a major natural disaster.

i would suggest looking outside the US. The zoning/land-use regime where single-family zoning dominates is not universal -- see http://devonzuegel.com/post/north-american-vs-japanese-zonin.... In fact, Japan kind of is a shining example of upzoning bringing down (and keeping down) rents to levels unthinkable in US cities.

In my old neighborhood, someone was going around buying pairs of pillbox houses and putting condos up in their place. I'm fairly certain that developers aren't waiting for houses to go up for sale to approach people. I know a guy who got cold called about his rental property because some big developer was trying to build... something... and needed about 5 lots to do it. They bumped the offer about 10% every time they called and eventually he was the last holdout so they called him a 3rd time.

>What these type of pieces never discuss is how much they think rents will be brought down by upzoning.

Sure they do. In an unconstrained market, prices will decline to the marginal cost of building one more unit. See Glaeser & Gyourko (2002): https://www.nber.org/papers/w8835.pdf

> What these type of pieces never discuss is how much they think rents will be brought down by upzoning.

That's not the way to measure success. The way to measure success is the number of new people living in the desirable area.

It's not "Rent is now $200 cheaper"; it's "3,000 people can now afford to live here that couldn't before (because, FYI, the rent is $X cheaper)".

Or, more likely, "3,000 fewer people were forced to move out".

Think of it like Climate Change. Sure, we can't fix the entire environment by planting a few trees, but every little bit helps.

we owe it to future generations to try our best and get as much housing supply as we possibly can. The whole problem isn't going away in 1 year, it took 4+ decades to create this problem and it will take multiple decades to fix it completely too.

Look at Houston. It's the 4th largest city in the US and growing much more quickly than any other city in CA. Their housing prices are 100$/sq ft!! How did they accomplish that? No zoning laws. Developers built as much housing as people needed and everyone prospers: it's win/win, more jobs, more housing, more prosperity. There's no reason this can't be done in an area with "nice weather"

That is how people wind up in this situation...

https://apps.texastribune.org/harvey-reservoirs/

Building homes in reservoirs.

Houston is really sprawling, and can expand in all directions. If the LA area didn't have an adjacent ocean, and mountains, it would be easier. Instead, if we do expand out past the mountains, then everyone has to funnel through the passes.

in market economies developer will come to homeowner and propose to buy house for 50% more than market price, owner will sell, buy house in another place and have half million $ on bank account.

Upzoning would not make a place like manhattan more affordable, there have been studies (https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/feds/files/2018035pap...) that evaluate what up to a 20% increase in housing supply would bring to any one given area and they never say it would fall by anything more than 2% (and that would be if the supply was introduced all at once in todays current environment).

What is shown by this is that, when you build more housing in desirable areas, people will always move in to fill it. The value of which being that more people can now experience such desirable areas. In fact, the price decreases aren't coming from the actual housing supply increase directly, but that prices fall when there is a bigger competitive pool of those seeking housing and those supplying it even with 1:1 increases on both sides.

So what's the solution?

The truth is there isn't one, in our current political environment we will neither see a command economy that seriously solves housing issues (or even something like what singapore does). We won't see national multifamily by right zoning/building codes that enable economies of scale for high density construction. We won't see every suburb in America allow density increases to the level that automotive travel becomes a serious hassle. Additionally, we won't see major financing efforts come about for new housing production at the scale of a trillion dollars a year (which is the level of investment needed from a debt financing perspective).

Within the broader market, the cost of financing and construction are just too high right now for housing prices to fall on the production side of the equation. It is not possible to build 1000 sqft apartments in existing dense parts of the US that cost $100k on the production side (what it would cost to build a similar sized average single family home) in any of these major cities, and that's before land acquisition costs.

The truth is, that the most viable way for creating affordable housing in this country right now would be to build an entirely new city made up of moderately sized row homes that would have the ability to sprawl as such for 60 miles in any direction from its center.

Sounds like a great environment to invest in Real estate!

Was with you until that last sentence. The most viable way to create affordable housing is to admit that a very small number of Tier 1 US cities are effectively full- and encourage smart young people to move to Denver and Charlotte and Miami and Raleigh and Indianapolis and Phoenix and Burlington and Madison and.....

But yeah, everything else you said is spot on. I previously worked in commercial real estate, and I find the Matt Yglesias-types' understanding of how property development works to be bordering on magical. I mean, again, I fundamentally agree with the YIMBY movement, and that many zoning laws are glorified rent seeking. But the affordability issue is fast leaving rational discussion and entering belief system territory. Manhattan & the Bay Area & LA are expensive because the demand to live there is 10,000x or 20,000x what it is to live in, say, Milwaukee. This is the root of the problem- you cannot possibly build enough to sate demand in a non-command economy

Explain Tokyo then.

No lol. Teasing out how housing prices or rents are connected to macroeconomic conditions & public policy & developer sentiment & the interest rate environment is already complex enough- way more complex than these YIMBY 'supply and demand, it's economics 101 brah!' type arguments. Adding in another country with its own laws and policies and customs and macroeconomic environment is way too complex. My point is that YIMBY/Matt Yglesias-types are already making complex concepts way too simple- we don't need to add in another country that (frankly) virtually no one on Hacker News is qualified to explain on an economic & policy level.

Like, Japan famously hasn't grown in years and years and is arguably suffering from deflation. Does that affect their housing prices as much as anything else? Does anyone here have a PhD to help explain these complex multi-causal factors? Probably not

Tokyo is able to solve affordability with massive economies of scale around prefabricated buildings (that include multifamily buildings).

To develop a comparable economy of scale, the US would need to significantly relax zoning rules and develop national by right standards.

> The most viable way to create affordable housing is to admit that a very small number of Tier 1 US cities are effectively full

Density of San Francisco: 18,838/mi^2.

Density of Barcelona: 41,000/mi^2.

> encourage smart young people to move to Denver and Charlotte and Miami and Raleigh and Indianapolis and Phoenix and Burlington and Madison and

This is a failed strategy, and a bit of reflection shows why it is. Think from the perspective of Google. If Google thinks the best engineers are in the Bay Area†, Google needs to be in the Bay Area. Otherwise, the best Bay Area engineers, who have a choice in where they work by virtue of the fact that they're the best engineers, will go work for competitors. Now realize that this dynamic is true for Apple, Facebook, and even Amazon and Microsoft, and you see why the situation is the way it is. Given this, the realistic options are (1) drive everyone but the rich out of the Bay Area; (2) build more housing. So far, rich municipalities like San Francisco are choosing option (1) under the guise of "progressivism".

Besides, even if it were possible to force Google to move, it isn't fair for rich people in the Bay Area to gentrify Modesto just because they don't want to build housing.

†I'm not arguing that engineers in the Bay Area are actually better than engineers elsewhere. The point is that the big tech companies think that the best concentration of engineering talent is here, and economically, that's what matters.

I find it ironic that leading Internet software companies, of all things, don't go all-remote and start hiring people from all over without requiring them to relocate to a few over-populated hubs. Wouldn't that solve the problem? We know that distributed software teams can indeed work effectively.

If the market was going to solve the problem that way, then it would have by now. Hoping that Google would hire remotely more often won't fix the housing crisis. Some employees prefer offices, and not all jobs can be remote, such as Apple's hardware work. And there are other benefits of physical proximity: meetups, conferences, venture capital, etc. etc.

This is a fundamental problem with our society at large and market economies in general. Companies find it easier to deal with the consequences of a resulting regional housing crisis near their headquarters than they do to invest in second tier cities.

You know how you get those smaller cities to be places where tech companies can grow successfully, you start now, by building infrastructure that retains the college graduates from the area, and in 10-20 years, the region has highly competent professionals in the given field.

This would be a good idea, if Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities weren't also "effectively full" (they aren't full, but their land is mostly all claimed by someone and unusable for human housing, so they are effectively 'full')

We have an affordability crisis in Michigan because average rents are now up into the $1600/month range in many areas. Once you adjust for income, a $1600/month rent in Michigan is an effectively identical expense to a $3200/month rent in SF/NYC.

When NYC / SF / other top-tier cities chew you up it's no big deal -- cash out and move to the Midwest. But what can someone do when a Midwest or other bottom-tier cities chews them up? They're stuck, there's nowhere cheaper to move that still has any jobs.

>evaluate what up to a 20% increase in housing supply would bring to any one given area and they never say it would fall by anything more than 2%

Hold on. That study is about an increase in the housing stock of a single neighborhood in a city, only for the top decile of expensive neighborhoods, and the resulting effect on rents within that same neighborhood. Its counterfactual is somehow taking the entire private expenditure used to build that housing and putting into public works projects in the bottom 9 deciles of neighborhoods in order to attract demand there instead.

Notice how I said in my comment that it would not make manhattan affordable, I never said it wouldn't make the broader region more affordable.

I tend to think of it in much more brutalist terms: what's the desirable or appropriate ratio of population to housing units for housing to be affordable for everyone? If the ratio in one area is too high, upzone. If it's too low and that's somehow causing problems as well, downzone.