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Comment by harryh | Hacker News Reader

Imagine car suppliers were only allowed to build 1M new cars per year (in the US, consumers currently buy about 17M new cars per year). Suppliers would no doubt use their limited quota to produce high end cars for the richest customers.

This is essentially the situation housing suppliers have in many major cities. The solution isn’t government built housing. Private suppliers are perfectly capable. The solution is to lift the quotas.

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What quotas are you referring to?

Is your claim that fewer regulations would result in a net increase in affordable housing stock?

Zoning.

Yes.

Thanks for the reply. We have pretty compelling historical evidence that the market does not solve this problem.

It depends on what you mean by "solve."

Can the market 100% solve all housing problems? No, probably not. Can the market solve A LOT more housing problems than it currently is? Yes, absolutely. The market is hugely constrained by government enforced zoning in a huge number of places right now. It's the primary housing issue of our time.

Zoning laws are not the thing restricting affordable housing supply, certainly not in Berlin and rarely elsewhere either.

I can't speak for Berlin, but it's basically illegal to build new housing in sufficient quantities in virtually every major American city. Due to this fact, prices have shot up everywhere.

The entire state of California now has a housing crisis with > 30% of residents spending more than a third of their income on housing.

Some estimates indicate that the US as a whole has underbuilt by around 5M units of housing. There are quite a few causes to this, but exclusionary zoning is definitely one of them.

I don’t know generally that zoning laws are the problem in Berlin but famously voters fought against adding housing units at the old airport vs the communal parks that were there:

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/cities/2015...

It certainly seems like voters are prioritizing things besides affordable housing and getting what they want (expensive rent and nice parks).

I don't think you can generalize from that specific scenario to your broad claim.

It is not necessary to usurp famous city landmarks to offer affordable housing. Berlin is large and underdeveloped.

> Imagine car suppliers were only allowed to build 1M new cars per year

Analogies like this don't work and you know it.

There is plenty of evidence that housing supply is significantly limited by zoning regulations in lots of places. And in those places the little bit of construction that does happen tends to be targeted to the top of the market.

So I'm not just making an analogy. I'm reasoning from the available evidence.

The zoning laws aren't a product of government-en-vacuuo, however.

They're the result of moneied interests, most especially real estate and banking interests, constraining supply.

Government is the mechanism through which they act, not the source of the problem itself.

The interests in favor of zoning are almost all homeowners actually. Not sure if that is what you mean by "real estate interests."

Source?

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