Solution: Require neighborhoods of single family homes to be replaced with high density high rises when a certain density is reached.
Solution: Force owners of undeveloped lots to sell to developers.
I actually don’t agree with any of those. Just like you shouldn’t have the right to take my property to create additional housing, you also don’t have the right to tell a community to change its character or compensation. That’s really what the government is. It’s the community. And if the community doesn’t want new development, that should absolutely be allowed.
But my personal distaste should have absolutely no bearing on the norms a foreign (to me) community chooses for itself.
We need a way of sunsetting rules that no longer make sense when technology makes radical change possible. We also need to remember that competitive companies don't succeed long-term (i.e., in timespans of decades) by producing things that intentionally kill their customers. (Ford hasn't done too well in the decades after the Pinto!)
The idea that we don't need fire codes because company owners or employees care what happens decades down the line is misguided.
Sometimes you do though. There are real cases where the acid rain produced by City A falls entirely on City B. Surely in that case City B should be able to tell City A to change its character? Local government alone will never solve a problem like this.
The people who pay the price for SF's character are not people who live in SF, but people who commute a long way from outside the city limits, or who don't live in the Bay Area at all but would if they could. The SF government should care less about them than about current SF citizens, but their interests aren't zero. Which is why you need a higher level polity like the CA government to overrule the local government .
That's fair enough. But the federal government provides a ton of incentives to promote home ownership. If a local community doesn't want to meet its endogenous demand for housing, it's essentially offloading the problem to other parts of the country.
A local government that artificially restricts housing should automatically lose all of these federal incentives. Because when supply is inelastic, it doesn't actually increase home ownership, just makes the existing landowning class wealthier. If a community refuses to build housing that's fine. But homes in that community will never be eligible for Fannie or Freddie mortgages. Homeowners will not get a mortgage interest tax deduction. In fact they should have to pay income tax on the value of imputed rent. No more capital gains exemption on their primary residence.
I expect some communities will still choose to keep their policies in place. But I think the vast majority of states and municipalities would change their tune pretty quick.
it encourages your solutions without "forcing" anything.
It's definitely a double-edged sword with no right answer, though. You can encourage the efficient use of land with high land taxes to bring in development of badly needed housing, but you will be altering the ability of previous residents to stay in their homes.
Likewise, it's not unreasonable to see local governments reflect the will of their constituents saying "We recognize that these actions mean that new people and businesses will not be able to move in here, and we're all fine with that."
It seems like this is directly a tradeoff between the rights of current residents vs. considerations for prospective residents. Neither one of those groups is intrinsically more valuable than the other. While land tax is really great at making places more livable for new residents at the expense of current occupants, restrictive zoning and current-valuation taxes are great at preserving the neighborhoods that people already live in, at the expense of new people being able to join those neighborhoods.
in any area where the residents are the landowners, they're being paid a fair price for their land and so the development is not "at the expense" of anybody.