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Comment by oconnore | Hacker News Reader

> the motion would significantly increase the cost of constructing housing in Los Angeles

NIMBYs at it again.

Worse. It’s to sell more concrete and steel buildings.

It's a combination of both. NIMBYs love anything that makes construction more expensive because it limits construction, and also ensures that only the wealthiest can have housing, further driving up the price of their primary asset: land.

Do you mean land or real estate? Because if it's harder and more costly to build on land, that should decrease demand for it, and prices should fall. Demand for already-improved land should rise, though.

When there's a global limitation on what can be done with land, it limits how much use can be achieved by any given bit of land. The demand is still there, but it's met by further and further out parcels of land, causing them to go up drastically in value. In addition, this causes all sorts of urban sprawl. Which is exactly what happened in LA. They had a huge downzoning of the entire metro area 50 years ago, driving up the prices of land everywhere, to the benefit of suburban NIMBYs in sprawl.

TL;DR, when the use of land is broadly limited, on the macro scale, the demand still exists and shifts the price of all land up on the supply-demand curve. The dynamics of limiting individual parcels or small sections of land often have the opposite effect, though.

And at the same time, increasing the amount of a particular asset many in the US seems to love, at least based on the policies in many places: homeless people.

Increase for constructing single story housing, right? Do they normally construct denser housing with wood? Seems silly to mention NIMBYism when it pushes land use to more denser options, no?

It's pretty common these days to build "five over one" construction. This is typically a 3-6 floors of wood frame construction (Type 5 in some codes) over 1 or two floors of concrete (Type 1)[1]. It's a cheap way to build mid-rise buildings which would be banned by this proposal.

[1] Sometimes this is explained as the "five over one" meaning five floors of wood over one floor of concrete, rather than a reference to building codes. Either way the concept is the same.

They are called "one plus five" or one plus four":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-plus-five

>The one-plus-five style of buildings exploded in popularity in the 2010s, following a 2009 revision to the United States-based International Building Code, which allowed up to five stories of wood-framed construction.

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