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Comment by BurningFrog | Hacker News Reader

> The city here is allowed to, and does, exercise a lot of control over what can be built, to serve the common good

This is, unfortunately, naive.

The city will use its power to serve the interests of those who hold power in the city, while of course saying it's for the common good.

Typically, those in power do want higher housing prices, and thus promote a housing shortage.

The only solution is to not give the city that power.

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> Typically, those in power don't want higher housing prices, and thus promote a housing shortage.

I don't get that, wouldn't a housing shortage bring the prices up?

Yes, and those with power are a lot more likely than average to own property. But “those with power” can be a very broad group. Look at California. People want their property prices to go up so they ban new residential building unless it’s only affordable by the rich. You get houses on Palo Alto going for well over ten times the price a similar house would cost in metro areas that allow more and denser building.

> You get houses on Palo Alto going for well over ten times the price a similar house would cost in metro areas that allow more and denser building

Disagree that dense building is the deciding factor in a 10x difference. The home prices being higher than other metro areas reflects the strength of the Bay Area job market. There are plenty of markets less expensive than Palo Alto, some of them allowing more construction and having good jobs, but there is no metro area in the United States 10x cheaper than Palo Alto with the same access to a job market of the same caliber.

Example: Seattle is cheaper, builds more and is a tech hub. But it's not 10x cheaper, maybe within 2x last I checked a long time ago. To get a 10x difference you need to sacrifice on another metric, and go to a place with a less booming economy and fewer jobs.

If you build dense enough in an area with a hot job market you’ll still get large differences in house/apartment prices but you won’t get houses costing 100x plus what they do elsewhere. Pal Alto 1950s ranch homes cost a lot more than the equivalent in Boise.

If you want to see what building dense can do don’t look at Seattle. Look at New York City. Brooklyn isn’t Manhattan dense but it’s more affordable. But NYC’s entire metro area is comparatively dense in the US. People commute from Jersey City in under an hour. If all of NYC was zoned to allow the level of density you see in Manhattan prices wouldn’t drop as much as you’d naively expect because there’d be even more economic activity but they’d drop plenty. Tokyo has increased ~50% in population over the past thirty years and land and rent prices have been pretty much flat. That’s what allowing dense building makes possible.

> Pal Alto 1950s ranch homes cost a lot more than the equivalent in Boise.

This is obvious, but it's also obvious that, with respect, few people want to live in Boise and if they did, and could make Palo Alto money, housing would become much more expensive.

> Look at New York City.

A very expensive place, not 10x cheaper than Palo Alto and not Boise. Nothing you said is news to me or refutes the point.

Yes, these differences can be big, and housing policy affects the number. But you can't say it's the reason a non job center city is cheap, or claim that the factor is 10x.

Yes, I bungled my entire point there by mistyping!!

Thanks for pointing it out. I fixed it. But I can understand if no one is that impressed by my Deep Thoughts regardless...

The solution to the problem you mention is to hold people to the duties of their office. Some cities are better at it than others.

The only people who can hold mayor to their duties are the ones already living in the city. Everyone who got excluded by these minimum-size policies doesn't get to vote.

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