This seems disastrous for homeowners and landlords hoping to recreate this Silicon Valley success flywheel https://twitter.com/nextdoorsv/status/1129046954409902081
But I don't entirely agree with this point. Regular folks that are getting rich off property are the single family homeowners. Density tends to increase land value. This law makes single family home land more valuable and easier to sell, since a developer can plop townhomes or a second house in the backyard and profit. So now on top of regular people, you've got builders competing for the same properties, hence prices will rise.
I'd be worried if I owned a townhome or condo, since I wouldn't have any empty land to be built on and that's the kind of home that will be built on the now upzoned land. But there are no swathes of empty land in Portland to fill with more single family homes.
Folks that own property the in the (now up-zoned) expensive neighborhoods are NIMBY because they want to preserve the low density neighborhood they live in that are close to everything, not because they want housing prices to soar more. Older neighborhoods like that just aren't built anymore--developers pick off the shelf of 1-5 nearly identical plans and fill a neighborhood with them. Old west coast city neighborhoods have a cool vibe that doesn't really exist in many places anymore, and can't really be replicated. With this up zone that will be going away over time.
That's OK, because these neighborhoods should have been upzoned a long time ago and the land needs to be accessible to more people. But the conversation is more nuanced than "my housing price will go down!!1"
This is a key thing. There is very little undeveloped land within Portland city limits, and the vast majority of it is lots under 1000 square feet. Most of what is there is in places that would be expensive, laborious, or unappealing to work with, like the sides of heavily sloped hills, lots completely surrounded by other lots without road access (have fun trying to work out right of way for a driveway), or waaay out nearly in the suburbs, at which point you may as well go five more minutes in that direction and save yourself some on the taxes.
If you have the means buy a cheap SFH lot in Portland while you can.
If we really actually want to make housing not an investment then we need to empower our government to fund the development of publicly owned housing for everyone.
If you occupy a publicly funded housing unit, I can't - it's not a public good. And there are always developers and builders willing to stump up cash to build new housing.
Seems to me that there's a market failure here where the market cannot create affordable housing. It's not regulations alone that have made it so that developers can't make affordable housing. The construction costs are simply too high for a for-profit developer to be able to do it.
Housing these homeless people, thus reducing health costs and emergency worker costs is of course a public good. I would like to be able to use that park again.
But aside from all that I don't agree with your narrow thesis of what public dollars should be spent on anyway. If I'm a renter I'd rather have my monthly rent go to back into the public purse to be re-invested in more public works than to some S&P500 listed REIT to pad some wealthy investors' dividends. If housing development is such a good investment then of course the public should get in on it.
I don't know about Vancouver's specific problems. Why are the construction costs so high there?
In the Bay Area regulations, and tax laws that incentivize holding on to old housing, are largely to blame for the lack of housing supply.
> If I'm a renter I'd rather have my monthly rent go to back into the public purse to be re-invested in more public works than to some S&P500 listed REIT to pad some wealthy investors' dividends
Who in turn pay taxes on those dividends. Maybe increase those taxes, and taxes on the property itself.
> If housing development is such a good investment then of course the public should get in on it.
Lots of businesses are a good investment. That's not a good reason for the public sector to get into it.
There's no real reason why construction costs are high. As the amount of construction increases, the available labour pool decreases, and labour costs accordingly increase. There is always lots of construction going on. More highly trained trades would help, but easier said than done.
If anything it's more that construction costs are artificially low in the USA since there is a class of illegal immigrant labour which can be exploited and paid low. That does not exist in Canada.
It might be worth digging into why Vancouver has so much housing demand. It's a stunningly beautiful city, but the local economy doesn't seem to correlate with the price of real estate. There are no FAANGs paying senior engineers $400k, so why are people spending so much money?
So as I said it actually becomes more difficult to build the more you build.
Vis a vis labour demand there's also competition from non-residential construction projects (eg. Amazon building a big warehouse somewhere, dam construction, bridge construction etc).
As an investment a house is a place including neighborhood to live for a long time. You should be friends with the neighbors. When you get old it is a cheap place to live (you have it paid for). It is a place to save your memories (little Bobby tables bit the rail there...). A place to make what fits your life.
It isn't a savings account to get cash out of when you want some.