Housing isn't a free market, it's heavily regulated, with a healthy amount of influence from wealthy interests going into that regulation.
Like, how do you observe the stagnation and not connect it to regulation?
Like, how do you observe the stagnation and not connect it to regulation?
Limited tax income (we all vote on that), geometric expansion of infrastructure cost as city radius grows, 'bow wave' of old insufficient infrastructure buried under the old city that cost bundles to remediate...you can go on and on.
I know its fun to pretend conspiracies are everywhere, and the man is keeping you down. But there are real reasons for things, and its more helpful to know them. Especially if you plan on voting.
On the demand side, the asset price trend of housing / land is directly chosen by the central government when it picks interest rates.
It's foolish to say that the housing market is anything resembling a free market. And brushing off discussion of specific mechanisms of causality as "conspiracy" is just intellectual laziness.
Even before rising to the level of explicit policy, existing residents are generally against new development because it will eg take away open space they've come to take for granted. I actually just had the pleasure of observing a town meeting over environmental concerns for a new development, and one abutter shamelessly asserted the area would be better kept as park (completely out of the scope of this commission). Of course the real answer for how to control adjacent land is to buy it (possibly communally), and then enact your will, but a whole host of issues makes this unwieldy in the US.
Would you prefer that the residents have no input into local conditions?
In most cities I've lived, developers had all of the power in local politics because they had the money. That didn't go well either.
"On the demand side, the asset price trend of housing / land is directly chosen by the central government when it picks interest rates."
Hoards of people moving into a constrained area with a shit ton of money clearly have no effects.
And how is "the central government" not a conspiracy theory?
And some are bad or over-used, like parking minimums, and the various barriers that prevent density and walkability upgrades (low-rises, multi-unit conversions, mixed use development).
Traffic management is a planning problem, but it isn't a reason to not build things (for instance, if you refuse to build things for traffic management and limit density, you probably just end up with more traffic anyway...).
"“I just want to threaten them and then stick a straw into the Tennessee River,” state Senate President Pro Tempore Butch Miller, R-Gainesville, said during a hearing..." (2018)
If you have been through north Georgia recently, you probably noticed that all of the lake levels are very low. Atlanta takes a lot of water.
The regulations have the effect of picking winners and losers, and since the regulations were written by the old established homeowners they were the ultimate winners. If young people and renters want to see change in their lifetime they need to start getting themselves elected to local boards and councils. Local politics matter.
Also, its hard to get elected to local government in places you don't live in.
The retirees could sell their property to developers for millions. The losers would be those who want to continue living there, but are taxed or zoned out of their homes. See "gentrification" and "regulatory taking".
That's actually a really vague, bullshit reason cited by people who want to keep, say, people poorer than them out.
To provide a bit more substance: if you never build any new housing, and prices go up and up, maybe the physical form of the neighborhood stays the same, but the character of the people who can afford to live there absolutely changes.
Absolutely not. These are horrendous reasons and take much of the blame for the housing crisis. We must build upwards to house people.
But there's a reason Paris "feels" different than Dallas, or Brooklyn different than Manhattan. A big reason I enjoy traveling is to experience these difference "neighborhood cultures". Without some restrictions, you risk destroying what makes a city special.
I'm not making any sort of value judgment here--it's not up to me alone to decide "character is more important than housing" (or vise versa), and I won't pretend to know where to draw the line on those restrictions.
Height restrictions are often put in place because the underlying infrastructure (water and sewage, electrical grids, traffic/roads) and occasionally even the ground itself simply cannot support a high rise every block.
And it also helps a lot that it was not mostly built for automobiles like so many Post-WWII cities in the US have been.
In any case, I think it's obvious that someone currently in a single family home doesn't want a 40-story highrise going up right next door to them. So in the absence of explicit zoning, perhaps there could be some formula like limiting new construction height to no more than 50% taller than the median height of buildings within a 1km radius or something. This would still permit triplexes and low rises in established neighbourhoods, without having existing homeowners be completely taken advantage of.
Lest my sincerity be doubted, my downtown neighbourhood in Kitchener is a total jumble— it's mostly century homes, but a bunch of them have been duplexed or triplexed, plus there are the occasional chunky multi-unit buildings and townhouse strips, and even a few larger rental towers. I think it's great! Take a look:
https://www.google.com/maps/@43.4550536,-80.4917221,331a,35y...
That’s the other extreme to government only-housing (i.e. socialist economy housing). We’re in the middle somewhere and sometimes NIMBYism gets the best of us, but Houston is a decent counterexample.
There are probably good zoning type regulations (things like controls on industrial activities) and there are certainly excessive building regulations. The classic problem of regulation is doing it right, not the question of doing it vs not doing it.