What if you're someone who thinks building stack-and-pack residences is the incorrect response for an investor-manufactured housing shortage?
Portland, Ore. is facing a huge housing crisis because single-home zoning prevented increasing density. Without the ability to create more housing on existing land, there is a shortage. It's that simple. They recently passed a law allowing more dense developments, and that will create more supply. There are currently 10 apartment projects in flight in the city, so there is no cabal conspiring to not build housing as you suggested.
Unfortunately, current homeowners love the shortage because it is increasing the value of their homes in ways we haven't seen since ... ever. Which is incredibly short-sighted because the economy will stall without housing, which will crater the boom. Moreso because if they sell, where are they going to move in the same town? They would need to sell and leave town to someplace cheaper. It is amazing to me how many people don't think one more step ahead.
I routinely take 3-mile walks through my neighborhood in NE Los Angeles. There are at least two homes on each block that are unoccupied. The nearby stack and pack developments don’t offset the inventory sitting idle.
Vacant homes from "investors" are almost certainly older residents that have moved, or passed away and left it to kids that haven't figured out what to do, or just owners in the area that have locked in low property taxes and don't want to bother with the hassle of renters.
These are precisely the small-time landholders that benefit the most from stopping apartments from being built, because the source of their investment games is entirely from scarcity.
And the cure is precisely to take away their ability to limit housing by building what you call "stack and pack."
Here's the behavior of PE firms when it comes to renting houses, they rent them out and charge for everything:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/04/magazine/wall-street-land...
As for the vacancy rates, how do you know the homes are vacant, and what is the proper vacancy rate? These can be looked up in from Census ACS estimates, though I hear that the Post Office sometimes has better data.
I would say that a healthy vacancy rate is at least 7%, possibly higher.
If anything, Vancouver is solid evidence that vacant homes are not the problem, despite so many current homeowners being desperate to use them as an excuse not to build more homes. In Vancouver, the tax provides a small income stream, but has changed nothing at all structurally. And that's in combination with the foreign purchaser tax.
The one solution is to start building what people want, what you derisively call "stack and pack", in sufficient numbers over a long enough period of time to satisfy everyone's desire for housing.
We are not off the mark by 10% in the amount of homes needed in LA or the Bay Area, we are 30%-50% off or more. We have been under building for decades now.
I'm saying by taking inventory off the market by buying houses and leaving them vacant, investors are contributing to the housing shortage. I'm pretty sure collectively controlling a small percentage of the market, investors can cause an increase in the cost of housing, per the law of supply and demand.
[1] https://www.oregonmetro.gov/sites/default/files/2020/02/24/U... Anything outside the yellow line can't be developed without a massive legal fight.
> people like you
I think you may have been triggered by poor reading comprehension and gone off in a fit of ignorant rage and assumed I thought sprawl was a good thing.
How are you any different that the someone who doesn't want an apartment building built because it would change the character of the neighborhood? Both of you support policies that increase the cost of housing in the hopes that everyone will live the lifestyle that each of you prefer. You prefer multi-family housing and want people to live in it, and support policies that make it expensive to live in single-family housing. The hypothetical NIMBY (who is, as mentioned previously, not someone who is purely interested in maximizing their house's value) prefers to live in single family homes and wants it to be expensive to live in multi-family housing. I'm sure you'll reply with some handwavy thing about sustainability and externalities, but the NIMBY can similarly bring up crime, noise, congestion, and other issues with dense living. There is no difference other than which housing type the two groups prefer.
I would be less hostile if urbanists like yourself would just admit that they want to force everyone to live their prefered lifestyle instead of hiding behind bogus economical and questionable environmental arguments. If you truly just wanted the option to rent apartments then there would be no need for policies like urban growth boundaries. Removing both the zoning rules and the boundaries would allow for housing that people want to be developed, but what would you do if your neighbors make the "wrong" choice?
You've been nothing but hostile in this discussion (and apparently from your history, many others). Also you literally edited a comment to deny a claim you made. Just stop.
Do you have evidence of this? I would think increasing the supply of housing would have a downward effect on all housing. Sure, if you're really set on a SFH and there are fewer of them, you'll have to compete. But I think people who want a SFH want a SFH _neighborhood_, and there's an unanswered question to what extent different types of housing can substitute for one another.
The value of _land_ may increase with zoning because development rights are still in limited supply, and the profit opportunity for a developer has gone up. But I don't see many SFH owners clamoring to let their neighbors on both sides be replaced with 5-over-1.
In addition, many suburban areas are not exclusively single-family houses; they already contain a mixture of apartment buildings and commercial areas, so I dispute your point that single family home buyers insist on exclusively single-family neighborhoods. In most suburban areas I've seen, the apartment buildings tend to cluster together, often near a commercial area, so if you're deep in a sea of houses it's unlikely that your next door neighbor will sell to a developer. People may not be excited if their next door neighbor sells to a developer who plans to build an apartment complex, but that doesn't change the value of their lot, which has increased because the developer is willing to pay more for it if they can build bigger buildings on it.
I was talking about a market with no rules restricting what can be built, and in such a market the neighbor has no say, so their personal opinion is irrelevant. The guy I was arguing with wanted restrictions on housing types he liked to be repealed, but wanted restrictions on housing types he didn't like to be enacted, and I was trying to point out that hypocrisy. Building houses versus apartments is a balancing act governed by demand, but market distortions like banning one type of housing or another can cause an undersupply of certain types of housing, which leads to an increase in prices for the type of housing that is undersupplied and for the substitute it's would-be buyers end up using.
[1] https://news.gallup.com/poll/245249/americans-big-idea-livin...
If you believe that SFH buyers do not insist on SFH neighborhoods (whole cities are not neighborhoods), and should welcome denser zoning because it makes their lot more attractive for redevelopment, go circulate a petition for this among SFH owners and see how far it gets.
To your other point about insisting on SFH-only neighborhoods, in large parts of the country, there are apartment buildings and large commercial areas spread between and in single family neighborhoods, and that hasn't stopped people from buying houses there. I wasn't arguing that they all should support higher density zoning, just that it is in their financial best interest to do so. Another major problem is that because the Bay Area has refused to build anything for decades, it has decades of unmet (or to use urbanist language "induced") demand for houses, apartments, roads, transit, etc. that has to be met before prices and congestion will start to go down. To maximize housing affordability you need a mix of sprawl and density with appropriate infrastructure for the type housing built, and if you only do one type of growth you will have many people who are unhappy, which is why in another comment in this thread I accused the YIMBY urbanist of being the same as a NIMBY SFH owner, just with a different preferred housing type. The Gallup survey I linked earlier shows that there are more people currently living in cities (presumably in apartments) who wish to live in suburbs or rural areas (presumably in houses) than the reverse, so there is an unmet demand for "sprawl" and options like remote work.
My major point if a SFH owner in SF was purely motivated by money, they would welcome development on their land and wish to limit it on others'. Many of them aren't though, and they aren't lying or using euphemisms when they say they want the character of their neighborhood preserved. I hear tons of arguments that they are opposing multi-family housing because it would lower their property values, and that just doesn't make sense. A San Francisco with an apartment built for everyone there who wants one and no other changes would most likely still have million dollar houses, though the rent of the apartments would be less.
Apartments create greater affordability, they allow for designing cities with lower carbon impact than single-unit homes, they allow better community, more connections, cradle-to-grave living, they allow people to survive without having to get in a car to do any task during the day. They are fantastic. I would live in a "stack and pack" home in an instant if they were allowed in my community.
I guess I’m just saying there should be cheap smaller houses and condos in cities too, not just rental places.
(One of my more heretical opinions is that homes and land shouldn't be considered investments, and should perhaps not be a method of wealth building, as it turns every person into an investor whether they want to be or not. Which fuels regular people to take control of the local political processes that block new homes with talk of "luxury condos" and "stack and pack." If we are going to do something like this I'd favor a sovereign wealth REIT that redistributes the wealth more evenly and removed the financial incentive to be anti-competitive in land use decisions. That, or tax away all profits from speculation on land gains.)
Which isn't to say anybody should be forced into a multi-unit building and mixed-use neighborhoods. But as you point out, prices for these types of settings are often higher than detached homes, indicating that they are under supplied and more people want them then are currently allowed to live in them.
I also see a lot better community with less people, and I'm sure there are many reasons for that.
I've never heard of investors lobbying against social housing (in the UK at least).
Forcing investors and developers to provide "affordable housing" arguably makes the problem worse. I.e. it makes it harder to make a profit and therefore disincentivises building new homes.
Investment properties don't always turn into occupied rentals; sometimes they turn into vacation/secondary homes, airbnbs, &ct. They can also end up vacant if the dwelling is being used purely as an investment vehicle or if the landlord is uninterested in lowering rent in response to market forces, although it's hard (for me, a lay person who doesn't want to spend more than a couple minutes googling) to know if those are significant quantities of homes or just a rounding error.
>I've never heard of investors lobbying against social housing (in the UK at least).
I don't know how UK politics works, but in the US, large investment banks and lobbying groups pour huge amounts of money into our political system, and individual investors also happen to be voters. For example, the last CA ballot measure which would've improved housing justice somewhat (2020's prop 21) saw heavily-financed opposition from landlord associations.
>Forcing investors and developers to provide "affordable housing" arguably makes the problem worse. I.e. it makes it harder to make a profit and therefore disincentivises building new homes.
I don't really have opinions about whether you should force developers to provide affordable housing in new developments, since I think trying to wield market forces to fix social problems has a poor track record in general. If you (well, the government, civil society, whatever) want to incentivize building new affordable homes, you should just build them yourself.