How to make housing more affordable
hoover.org
hoover.org
If housing is a good investment, that means it's appreciating faster than inflation, which will make it increasingly unaffordable as time passes.
If housing is affordable, and remains so, then it is not appreciating enough to make a good investment.
For decades, governments have made policies to make housing into a good investment. Things like government guarantees on mortgages to reduce the interest rate, mortgage interest deductions, property tax limits, and (yes) restricting the supply of housing through permits and zoning are all policies that serve to make housing a good investment, at the expense of affordability.
Making the ownership of a single family home affordable is in contradiction with making that a good investment vehicle.
An example: Medicare for all. Bottom 90% will save money, top 10% will lose money, healthcare system will be free at point of service and won’t be tied to employment. Doctors will still be rich but will make less money. Anyone invested in insurance industries will certainly lose here.
I’d argue that discussing policy in material terms is only unpleasant for the powerful, because they are a minority trying to convince the majority to vote against their interests. When it’s all laid out it’s clear where the majority’s interests lie.
Since buying a house comes with a large opportunity cost it may not be the best investment even if it is a decent one.
Take into account rent inflation and use 2.5% interest rates and then we'll see...
Your premise only holds true if you buy a house and keep it empty, and are only getting returns by the appreciation of the property, but this should be illegal anyway.
Sounds like your real question should be can anything is affordable in a hyper-inflation time.
Housing is anchored in inflation, no better or worse. Therefore housing built in with wealth as inflation doesn't hurt housing. By destroying wealth it doesn't make house affordable, only make worse hyper-inflation.
Come on, thought this is ecom 101. What do colleges teach these days?
The price of manufactured goods has dropped significantly, thanks to technological progress and offshoring. The Fed has a mandate that average consumer prices must always be going up. Housing is one of the few areas where the Fed can create monetary inflation that reaches consumers, since instead of giving away newly-created money it generally has to be in the form of loans. Therefore, the price of housing will shoot up to compensate for manufactured goods dropping. And the more efficient technology becomes, the worse the effect will be.
Yes it can, if you let people invest into development projects at the venture stage. (This carries inherent risk, of course, but not as much as you think.)
The idea that you can't own land/space outright, just for 99 years actually makes a lot of sense. You get to live there for your whole life, you aren't buying some intra-generational asset that will get passed to your kids & grandchildren etc. As a result the condos are much cheaper.
I think we could do the same with land. You can't buy a yard or farm, you just buy a 99 year lease after which it returns to the city or state.
Land leases massively disincentivize making improvements to land or structures, because it’s not even yours. What a great way to ensure the quality of our neighborhoods goes down over time.
Government bureaucrats should not have free control over those improvements after 100 years. Making all land rentable clearly isn't about encouraging development and affordability; a land value tax could do that. Making all land only rentable is clearly a scheme to allow government to steal valuable land from the current owners who otherwise could afford the taxes and wouldn't sell.
Many NIMBYs don't even care about their home value (unless they've purchased recently and don't want to be underwater on their mortgage). If you actually talk to most homeowners, especially the long term ones, they care much more about the neighborhood and home they've built so hard to create. Seeing a life of memories razed for concrete and glass townhomes/towers isn't an easy pill for anyone to swallow.
All that said, we do need to upzone for affordability. But all of this talk of "we aren't protecting your investment" is misguided, that isn't what single family homeowners care about.
Craftsman homes are much more popular in those cities than any style besides possibly mid century modern.
>If I buy a piece of land and spend to make improvements, I’d expect to sell at a price that justifies the investment or let my kids inherit my life’s work.
>Land leases massively disincentivize making improvements to land or structures, because it’s not even yours. What a great way to ensure the quality of our neighborhoods goes down over time.
There you go. Big statements about hypothetical expectations and pessimistic predictions for the future treated as though they were obvious, but really just re-statements of your own misgivings. Classic 'yelling old man'. You can hear dire predictions of that sort at any time now thanks to the internet. My favorite recent example was a round-a-bout coming to some rural area and the facebook announcement (?!) getting dire predictions of chaos and doom with the same sort of structure as the second example.
At that point it's probably easier administratively to say that you "own" the property and are paying a "land value tax" rather than a lease, but the principle is the same. The government receives the economic returns from the land being scarce, from its location, and from public works that increase its utility. The developer or property owner receives the economic returns from improvements they personally make to the property. What could be more fair?
What I"m not ok with is a lease system where the stability of your family and descendants is put at risk if the government refuses to re-lease the property to you. Who knows how tyrannical the government will be in a 100 years.
Ownership is a stronger model. Your property can't easily be taken away by bureaucrats so long as you pay taxes on time.
Why is that a good way to fund local services? The costs to provide most services have nothing to do with the value of the property, so why should my neighbor pay more for them than I do just because their house is on a bigger lot?
For example, if your home sits in a hot area where there is high demand for apartments, the home with the larger lot would pay more taxes because the potential for the lot is much higher.
Once the lot built to its potential, the tax per occupant would level to a fair cost per local government service used.
Of course, the owner can continue to pay a higher tax burden to use more of the lot for themselves. Because they own the lot, the government can’t force them to do anything else.
That’s how it should be. No government intervention / lease needed, just incentivize development by asking owners to pay an appropriate tax amount for the value of the space they occupy and let people make their own choices.
or alternatively, you could consider it a tax on the opportunity cost of you having exclusive use of a piece of land. your neighbor with the bigger lot is not consuming (much) more services, but the opportunity cost of not building more stuff on that lot is proportionately higher.
You don't have to re-purchase after 100 years. There is no risk that the government refuses to re-lease the property to you.
If your lease on your apartment expires, do you think you're not given first dibs on whether to renew the lease? Same deal here.
Say you buy a 99 year lease and plan to live there 20 years. When you are ready to leave you are selling the remaining 79 years on the lease.
Your improvements should increase the price you get for the remainder of the lease.
While the remaining term on the lease is still long it is not much different than owning (except that you might not be allowed to do things that harm the value of the property).
As the remaining time on the lease goes down, it slowly shifts from being like owning (with similar incentives) to being like rental.
I'd guess that for at least the first half of the lease (in the case of a 99 year lease) and maybe even up to 70 years so so into it there is plenty of incentive still for leaseholders to improve the property.
So you end up with a property that goes through 3 phases. In phase 1 the people living there have incentives to improve it. Then in phase 2 they just have incentives to maintain it (except maybe the last leaseholder). Then in phase 3 the lease has ended and the property is back in the hands of whoever owns it.
Phase 3 is the most interesting one I think. Imagine a development that was all 99 year leases starting at about the same time. When the leases all end the land is all back under the control of one entity. In the 100 years since the development was built a lot might have changed, and there might be some other better use for that land. That entity can then use the land for that.
If the development instead had sold each lot instead of 99 year leasing them, then 100 years later when there is some better use for the land it might be much harder or even impossible to implement that.
The question then is which is overall better? People owning their homes means there is always an incentive to improve the land and buildings. Long term sellable leases means that there is only such an incentive part of the time, but in exchange for that whole neighborhoods periodically become open to redevelopment. That could lead to more overall improvement in the long run for a city as a whole.
If you want affordability, land value tax will incentivize appropriate development.
If you want to steal/take control over land arbitrarily from its users, land rent is a good choice.
In my opinion, if someone owns land and can afford the tax, leave them be. Let them keep their land rather giving it to an entity that supposedly knows better what to do with the land than the occupant.
If you say 'well I control the gov't via democracy'! Well you would control that same 99 yo gov't lease holder too about just as much.
The government is the thing that allows the concept of land ownership. Anyone trying to take ownership will have to go through courts with legislature written by that government. Even if they gunned their way into occupation, getting a court order to have the (often better-armed) police turn it back would be possible.
I see no way around having a central coordinating body drawing up guidelines to define ownership. The ground is a finite resource I don't think anyone should be able to hoard and occupy indefinitely. That coupled with me not liking wealth inequality leads me to think that the Singapore (and others) way of leases might be good in the long run.
Why do you presuppose that land is something you should be able to buy outright?
It's your improvements on that land that you (should) rightfully own and be able to sell or pass on to future generations; those improvements are the result of your labor, after all (be it directly or indirectly). The land is not; it existed for millions (if not billions) of years before you, and barring a literal Earth-shattering catastrophe will exist for billions of years after you.
> Land leases massively disincentivize making improvements to land or structures, because it’s not even yours.
They do the precise opposite. If you're going to take up space, you should be using it for its maximum potential - and that's exactly what things like land leases or land value taxes incentivize (since it's pretty pointless to spend that money if you don't intend to develop it to its full potential).
I had this same reservation, but that is looking at it the wrong way. The US constitution's 1st amendment isn't central control, it is a human rights guarantee. Liberalizing restrictions on housing is likewise not central control, but shoring up property rights against local deprivation.
Japan had a housing crisis in the 1980s, but they pulled themselves out of it by massively liberalizing zoning and other restrictions on home construction, at the national level. Today families earning median incomes in Tokyo can afford to buy homes. That is something not true of San Francisco, New York, London Paris, etc.
1. Yes, if you want more affordable housing, you need to make it much easier to build homes.
2. The root cause of current housing crises, though, is that once any individual buys a home in an area, they immediately then have a strong economic incentive to make building new homes as difficult as possible (assuming they already live in a built-up area).
So the question is how you fix number 2, because in virtually any area home owners will have outsized political power. So the article talks about this somewhat at the end: removing local control over housing policy and giving more of that power to the state, which I agree is one way to address the issue.
But I still think the fundamental problem that needs more attention is how do you adjust (or nullify) incentives so that existing homeowners are prevented from making the house permitting process more difficult for everyone else.
If that’s true, then affordable housing pushes that address individual incentives also need to address incentives around “social equity.”
To the crowd at large: I would love to learn more about what exactly changed during this time period to change peoples’ incentives on such a massive scale. Was there some change in law/regulations to make housing a “safer” investment for people, besides just tanking the interest rates for other types of investments like is all over the news these days? Links or hints would be very appreciated :)
The problem is that whenever you build a new park, a new store, provide jobs, you have a positive externality in your neighborhood that is not captured solely by yourself. When someone who owns a parking lot and does nothing to earn that value gets richer, he goes out and buys more parking lots. He's taking your positive externalities.
We've already figured out the fundamental solution. Henry George worked all of this out 100 years ago.
If property taxes were raised to 100% annually of the cost of the home, the price of the house would instantly drop to somewhere near the annual rent cost. "Buying" the house would end up being close to a security deposit. It goes without saying though, that 100% annually is not a good number. It would disincentivize building, which is something we really need right now.
The right number is a Land Value Tax such that the cost of the property equals the cost of the building. So if you have two properties, one in downtown SF, and one in the middle of Montana, and each are the exact same house, but the Montana house sells for $200k and the SF house sells for $1M, really it's the land in SF selling for $800k. So that SF market price should move to $200k. To do so we need to tax the property at increasing rates(per sqft of land) until they match. When we tax enough, the new price will reach its improvement value.
In the short term this will have devastating effects on the Net Worth of individuals who took out loans or otherwise bet their income on owning a home, so I advocate for a one time tax credit(that for exceptional cases like the elderly would be transferable for straight cash upon sale of the property) equivalent to the drop in market value of the home. So in the SF case, they would get a $800k tax credit.
Once this system is in place being a NIMBY will no longer be a profitable stance, and will instead cost that area money in taxes. As it will no longer be a perverse incentive, the population will mostly switch to becoming YIMBY's, and advocate for better Zoning rules and to ease up on silly restrictions. The tax money can be spent on high value improvements to the area that will boost everyone's quality of life, and if none are found, can be simply given back equally to all.
Once this system in place and the tax credits have been used up, we can even go further and get rid of income taxes, sales taxes, corporate taxes, and capital gains taxes. The value of the land tax will be enough to replace all of them(by removing them, the land values will rise, which means the land taxes will rise). All from a tax that because land is at a fixed supply, is completely non-distortionary and results in no dead weight loss.
Housing can either be an investment or affordable long-term, it can not be both.
> Many people believe that the main reason housing is expensive in coastal California is that land is so scarce. As the saying goes, “They’re not making any more land.” That view is plausible. It’s also incorrect.
Turns out this take is itself incorrect. Land is scarce (more precisely, it has inelastic supply), and the reasoning for deeming the scarcity argument to be "incorrect" - that land permitted for building sells for a higher price than land not permitted for building - only demonstrates that some land is being artificially suppressed in value due to zoning restrictions, and says nothing about land scarcity's actual contribution to housing costs. It doesn't take a top-notch economist to figure out that if two identical houses on identically-sized plots in SF and Bakersfield go for $1m and $250k, respectively, the only remaining variable there is the demand for that land relative to its supply.
For this reason, the other half of the solution is to pair that eradication of zoning restrictions with a reworked property tax structure that incentivizes denser construction and penalizes hoarding empty/underdeveloped land (or otherwise treating land as a speculative asset).
Such a concept happens to have a name: a land value tax.
Replacing traditional property taxes with LVT (and, ideally, replacing other taxes like income and sales taxes with LVT, too, but non-land property taxes are the relevant one in this context) and loosening zoning restrictions both complement one another and together disincentivize the land-speculation-driven NIMBYism that dominates the current housing cost spiral in places like California.
Interest rates have gone from 10% to 2.5% and housing prices went up - it’s the same thing
People hurt each other without intending or realizing it, because it's hidden behind this abstraction called "money".
[Bloomberg] Vienna's Radical Idea? Affordable Housing For All https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41VJudBdYXY
I do not know the details of the legislation, but it is my understanding that the owner of a lot can raze the house and seek permits to put up up to four houses, depending on lot size. And the permit process will be on an 'as-of-right' basis, i.e., your neighbors can't block you with the CEQA nonsense: https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml...
Here is the relevant excerpt:
The California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) requires a lead agency, as defined, to prepare, or cause to be prepared, and certify the completion of, an environmental impact report on a project that it proposes to carry out or approve that may have a significant effect on the environment. CEQA does not apply to the approval of ministerial projects.
This bill, by establishing the ministerial review processes described above, would thereby exempt the approval of projects subject to those processes from CEQA.
People are apparently willing to drive 1 hour each way in a normal car, which is a huge pain. I would assume they'd therefore be willing to be driven even further in a self-driving car. You'd end up with an equally unpleasant equilibrium.
High density appears to create fragility. People were fleeing from cities during covid.
Widespread, affordable, high-density 3- & 4-bedroom units in South Korea where people will wear masks? Still occupied.
And you really need to be careful when comparing South Korea’s housing market with other countries. It has its own unique properties that would probably make no sense at all to outsiders at first glance.
This is the crux of the issue, not because it’s true, but because people believe it’s the case.
The value of the house itself would fall, but the value of the land would still increase with more flexibility in how it’s used. An 1800 sf home is never going to be worth $5 million. At some point, people will make other sacrifices to not have to pay that.
But I imagine that same lot could support a 10 unit building (just guessing). At $500k each, that property is now worth $5 mil, and each unit is comparatively affordable.
Even if the property owner doesn’t turn it into a 10 unit complex, others that do would cause nearby single family lots worth more since they could be converted, or kept for a super rich guy.
An underrated aspect is that most California leftists refuse to believe free market capitalism can solve the problem, regardless of the evidence. I think there are fewer people who are just protecting their property values than we think. We need to start talking about the issue with that in mind if we want things to change.
https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/181-Fremont-St-UNIT-58A-S...
You ask what we should be building, and where? How about replacing old single-family homes in the Bay Area or Los Angeles with high-rises, or at least mid-rises...or at the very least town houses or something!
If you were to put a 'food czar' in control of feeding everyone, it would never occur to said czar to just let businsess willy nilly put restaurants wherever they thought they could make a buck. It couldn't be that simple.
Wait.
Heavily taxing the third piece of realeste one adult buys. (A guy buys a home, and a getaway pad, fine. Tax the third property a lot to avoid homes being being accumulated.)
Put a unoccupied tax on vacant realestate too.
> Huge transaction fees and risks related to owning
When houses cost millions, yes this is true. But if we got house prices down to an actually affordable level, this would not be such a concern. If I decided today to move to winnipeg for a couple years, houses are so cheap (at least compared to what I'm used to) that I'd strongly consider just buying a house or a condo for the time I was there.
These suggestions seem unlikely to accomplish much, and they seem driven by a assumption that inequality and greed of the wealthy is the problem rather than local government red tape and NIMBYs holding back construction.
More supply reduces prices. Econ 101. It is strange how many people seem to think Econ 101 somehow doesn't apply to housing.
Speculative hoarding of the scarce resource of housing can lead to houses sitting empty, but speculation would be pointless if the resource weren't artificially constrained to be scarce.
I just don't believe this. I'm sorry. The difference between texas (which part, for one thing) and vancouver isn't down to real estate regulation. There are plenty of places in BC where you can buy a home for texas prices, and real estate regulation isn't that different city to city.
If developers are getting rich off building more, that means housing is crazy scarce, so scarce that people will fill the pockets of anyone who builds it. That means you need to build
Way
More
Housing.
Econ 101.
If you give a starving person a carrot and they were still starving after eating it, would you say that feeding has failed? Quantity matters! A lot!
A. Build more houses (and cross your fingers that the corporation doesn’t snatch those up too)
B. Criminalize renting to some degree
Except... they will beg the government to do something, tell some heart-rending narrative about those nasty rich developers, the government will do something, and they'll get to stay rich.
I may see a different villain here than you do.
It is not the case that, because an oil monopoly happened in 1900, we need to be hypervigilant to hypothetical monopolies in other industries where nothing remotely like that has ever happened.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_antitrust_law#Ri...
Meanwhile the American citizenry with humble dreams of one day owning a house feels their dreams drift farther and farther out because some people won’t acknowledge that there’s even a problem. Others want to reward these corporations by building more inventory.
Mine’s an environmental concern. NIMBYs are just trying to protect their housing investments.
Your concern is actually pretty common among the affluent homeowners who prevent development. Probably the second most common concern behind "neighborhood character", which is really just another type of environmental concern (city environment). Very few NIMBYs are purely after money.
"Housing defies economic laws and is terrible for the natural and/or city environment" is the prevailing opinion of NIMBYs today, based on the discussions I've been in.
It seems like you’re on the side of the upper-class trying to trade the environment to prop up their investments. This is just like BTC scammers trying to trade the environment for their investments.
So no, if one side of this is more like BTC scammers, it isn't mine. It is the guarantee of scarcity that underwrites the entire BTC enterprise, even for the miners who are today wasting electricity on generating more of them.
Renting has absolutely nothing with our housing problems. There are majority-renter housing markets that have nowhere near the affordability problems we have. Supply is far more important than who has the deed.
If you want rich developers to make less money, unleashing supply is the way to do that. Automakers and grocery stores have relatively low profit margins because there are no government-imposed supply constraints on them.
Frankly, though, I think it's more admirable to help the poor than merely make a doomed attempt to punish the rich.
Would you at least agree in a hypothetical US in which it is not possible to build further supply that banning renters would be the next logical step? Again, this is not to say or not say that supply should not be further built.
Owning means saving a lot of money and accepting a lot of price risk and transaction costs. I own a house and like it, but I know for a fact that it's not for everyone.
If there was one monopolist landlord who charged through the nose, that could be a problem, but I don't know of any housing markets like that. Landlords keep raising their prices because demand outpaces supply and they can get away with it.
If a single corporation owns all homes, they can artificially limit supply by buying up any new properties and leaving them empty.
If multiple companies own all homes, then they can try to artificially limit supply by buying up any new properties and leaving them empty, but there's huge incentive for each one not to: if it rents out every property it buys, it makes even more money than if it left any of them empty. It's the prisoner's dilemma - if all companies collude and limit supply they maximize total profit, but if any individual company "cheats" it stands to gain even more for itself.
It is possible for cartels to collude and pull this off (OPEC etc), but it's not possible when there are thousands and thousands of companies and many of them are too small to "take one for the team" and leave a property empty, or too disinterested in any collusion.
You mean anti monopoly laws? Let them pay monopoly taxes if their market share is bigger than 50% in any given city.
The 16k units you’re citing won’t stay empty for long, but other units in the system will go temporarily unfilled. This is necessary for a functional housing market. In order for prices to decline you need a vacancy rate of more than 5%. Prices will continue to rise even at 4% vacancy.
The economics here are well studied and well established. Housing economists broadly agree.
If there’s anything that markers are great at doing, it’s producing lots of stuff at decreasing marginal cost. Housing is no different.
Not only is said assumption pretty dang reasonable, but the former is outright the cause of the latter (specifically: rich landowners lobbying local and state governments to hinder development and shift tax burdens onto literally anything other than the land value they're hoarding).
Or is it possible that the YIMBY progressives who actually watch this issue in their local communities are right, and the biggest problem is NIMBYs vetoing everything to protect their "neighborhood character" and "the environment"?
NIMBYs hold a lot of power in local governments. They may be almost the only ones to turn out in many local elections and referendums.
What does that mean? That no apartment complexes can ever be built? Just checking I'm understanding you're suggestion.
Can only buy if they are going to knock down and build bigger. Application needs to be approved.
A large percentage of landlords own a very small number of units each. Many get into this to finance retirement, etc. Taxing this way of life would likely just make less units available for rent, and reduce the number of people in the market for properties, which would reduce the effective demand for housing.
Banning corporations? The smart thing to do when buying a house is to set up a corporation to own the property. The very wealthy will always be able to achieve the sorts of protections this provides - why keep others from it?
Root causes: - zoning restrictions - parking minimums (also perhaps a subcategory of zoning)
Long story short - yeah, we need to build more homes - but not using laissez-faire capitalism. As far as I can see in my lifetime that hasn't worked. Large scale socialized row-housing developments are what I'd like to see tried next.
Developer friendly maybe by comparisons to other place. But probably enormous by absolut value anyway. As an anecdote, I just googled custruction regulation in BC. So to just get access the build code, it costs 140$ dollars :).
I'm tempted to believe as in most western countries, there is an enormous amount of regulation permiating ever tiny aspect of construction process: from zoning, labor regulations, to enviromental restriction etc.. Not saying this is not needed, just pointing out that for many it might be a blind spot since all this regulation is taken foregranted...
I think most people in the "we built, but prices didn't come down" underestimate the scale of the problem. The (Canadian) population of peak homebuying age (20-40) exceeds the population of peak die-off age (65-85) by about 6 million. If people are still coupling up (not a guarantee these days of later marriage), that's about 3 million homes needed. Vancouver is about 5% of the population of Canada, so assuming no migration to the cities (also not true), that's about 150,000 new housing units. How many were actually built in 2020? 8000.
The city basically needs to get bigger by about 50%, and this needs to be repeated across most of the hot cities in the developed world. What would that even look like? Vancouver, Seattle, Portland, and the Bay Area are basically land-constrained; for them to grow 50% bigger over a decade, you either need a lot of highrises, or every SFH needs to be converted to a duplex.
And renter protections and limitations on rent increases are fairly strict in BC, which discourages the building of apartments. If you dropped the rent control, developers would be more likely to build apartments, with the possible result that rent might go down.
And having said that, rents are actually pretty low in Vancouver. When I moved down to Seattle from there, my rent went way up, in spite of the fact that housing was way more expensive in Vancouver at the time (2011). Last time I checked, that remained true: rent for a fancy downtown 2-br apartment in Vancouver was about $2k Canadian, equivalent in Seattle was over $2.5k USD.
Look to Tokyo for a city that eliminated zoning and rent controls, and is surprisingly affordable for a huge international city. You'll never see it on a cost-of-living list with Vancouver, New York, Paris, Sydney, etc.
Ever been out east? Row housing is dense, but has a yard and is suitable for families in a way that a condo can never be.
> If you dropped the rent control, developers would be more likely to build apartments, with the possible result that rent might go down.
We're BARELY rent controlled. Kick your tenant out and find a new one, boom you can double the rent. Technically illegal, but done constantly. If you really want to make it legit you can do a minor reno.
> rents are actually pretty low in Vancouver
Unfortunately I can't live in Seattle, and that seems like a disingenuous apples-to-oranges comparison. Because of the border/citizenship issue, those are separate markets. https://bc.ctvnews.ca/vancouver-s-rental-rates-are-the-highe...
My understanding is that it's fantastically hard to evict a tenant in BC. I've heard stories of landlords taking a year to evict a tenant who wasn't even paying his rent anymore, and destroying the apartment in the process. Though I guess most people will leave when asked. And from what I remember, annual rent increases are capped at 4% or something? The first 3 years I lived in Seattle, my rent went up 50%.
Basically, though, rents aren't bad in Vancouver, and that's the most critical aspect of housing. People can afford to live there. The situation could be easily improved, especially regarding housing ownership...by encouraging more building.
> Basically, though, rents aren't bad in Vancouver
Your argument seems to be “it’s worse elsewhere so quit complaining. I’ll remind you, this is the least affordable rental city in canada.
FWIW, I find the zoning argument to be the most persuasive if your goal is to make housing more affordable. If you have other goals, including a transit-friendly city, bike-friendly city, "green" city, etc then it will definitely not be optimal.
Row homes aren’t very land efficient and there aren’t any cities in the US or Canada where it would be financially feasible for governments to buy up enough land around cities to build enough row homes to meet demand. People who propose things like this never seem to remember that western governments can’t just take land from people who own it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eminent_domain
> Row homes aren’t very land efficient
But a lot more so than single-family homes.
There’s no politically realistic future where governments could build enough row homes to house the poor in places where there is economic opportunity. The land is too expensive, and trying to wrench it away by force of law would die in the courts or the ballot booth. This is a hopelessly utopian idea.
Markets are great at producing lots of cheap stuff, we could let housing work the same way.
Some politically realistic futures where this kind of thing had widespread support:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuban_Revolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/October_Revolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Communist_Revolution
> This is a hopelessly utopian idea
I'd argue that "let's keep doing markets despite the suffering we see around us" is a hopelessly dystopian idea, but...
No one is saying let’s keep doing markets”. The article and many posts like mine are arguing that building new and more dense housing has been illegal in most of the US for decades, which has lead to a housing shortage. We should make it legal to build more housing, so that the market can build more housing.
I’m not wholly opposed to some public housing, but it needs to be carefully financed and well maintained.
But ok back to your point: so market capitalism works - but in housing we haven't had markets because of gov interference. So what's an area where we have a free unconstrained market for a basic human necessity, that doesn't cause deep deep suffering?
Food, water, housing, heathcare, safety - these are things that when solved by "the market" necessarily exclude a small but significant portion of people. Market capitalism is the wrong tool for basic needs. Prove me wrong ;)
There are certainly issues in places with access to fresh food and we need to better maintain plumbing in some cities. Those are more complicated issues though and involve culture and government.
> 45 million Americans rely on stipends from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) to buy food each month
Yes, we have a lot of food here, but in a pure market, without money you don't get any of it.
Water is almost 100% public.