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Comment by namlem | Hacker News Reader

The subsidies aren't the root of the problem. It's municipal zoning laws. Just look at Japan. Went from having the worst housing bubble in world history to affordability in 20 years thanks to sweeping zoning reform.

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Your point should be a pretty easy hypothesis to test, you may not know this unless you are from Texas but Houston effectively doesn't have zoning laws.

Cost of living calculation between Dallas and Houston says costs are roughly 15% different (as apples to apples a city I can identify to isolate zoning effects). So definitely some effect and a good lever to pull (in addition to others I am sure.)

I agree that zoning reform is part of the issue, I think zoning reform combined with other tweaks would go a long way.

I think that multiple issues cause these problem, we have runaway negative feedback loops in multiple areas, the problems has evolved organically over time so I doubt any one factor is enough to resolve the issue (as nice as that would be.)

I'm not making the assertion that zoning is the sole issue so I don't need to defend it but I figured I could take a quick look and bring some numbers into the mix so we have some numerical grounding for conversation and exploring the problem.

Houston has zoning under a different name.

It is illegal to build in Houston properties that would be legal in Japan or Europe.

Do you have any examples of buildings like this, I've looked but can't find examples online? It seems zoning has a 15% overhead (all things being equal and as best as I could argue with the data I've found so far), maybe it's higher but I haven't found articulable/shareable evidence of that yet. IANAL, so hopefully an expert on HN can help chime in.

I've looked (links below) and have done more querying than a comment thread like this probably warrants but wasn't able to find your assertion articulated anywhere.

Neither Japan or Houston are unconstrained free-markets without land use control so I'm doing my best to roughly/quickly tease out zonings isolated impact on affordability. Neither locations have 0 laws so they are close to apples to apples and since we're just doing relative comparison I'd rather keep things data driven. Houston has deed restriction but that is a simple free-market/libertarian private contract solution. Does Japan ban deed restrictions? Both japan and houston have historical zones

I've linked these two jstore articles as well as a more digestible video.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/724839 https://www.jstor.org/stable/30238667 https://japanpropertycentral.com/real-estate-faq/building-re... https://www.planetizen.com/news/2021/04/113144-watch-debunki...

I'm not an expert by any means but there's a clip in another comment I made about some of Houston's zoning stuff, I'm curious what you think.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30376623

I lived in the Museum District/Third Ward in Houston for almost 2 decades now. Houston definitely has zoning. We just don't call it zoning. In fact, in addition to stealth zoning, we have neighborhood based facility also where even people in a neighborhood can tell you to piss off.

I'm not familiar with the ordinances in Dallas, but I think this may not be as much of an apples to apples comparison as you imagine if the thesis of that comparison is that "Houston has no zoning".

You have to find an actual free city to do the comparison.

My understanding is that japan does have historically protected districts, they call them preservation districts. I think it would be really helpful to have someone actually dive on the details.

Houston does rely on a lot on developers being able to put "deed restrictions" in place, which seems like their free-market/libertarian/state enforced private contracts solution.

I'm not familiar with Japan but their property laws are not unregulated so I think it's worth sussing that out so people can properly back their assertions with arguments and maybe we can derive a defendable % cost impact from zoning laws.

Japan has serious zoning law, but the issue is that it's reasonably scoped zoning that doesn't do things like "only single family homes here, no commercial properties including ban on corner shops" - they define what could be termed maximum allowed nuisance level, and the defined categories create a spectrum with overlap at both ends of each category. Even category 1, low rise residential, permits low-rise multiple units, small offices and shops etc. as well as certain public utility buildings (schools and the like). Compare it with zoning (or zoning hidden under other bylaws) in USA where you can end with a big area that permits only single family houses - no shops, not even a small grocery store, etc.

So, I've lived in both Dallas and Houston (and Austin). Zoning has nothing to do with the price delta. It has more to do with employment, jobs, income, etc. The market will charge what the customer can afford kind of thing. Same reason RE in Austin is much higher than Houston or Dallas. It's all about tech money and influx of wealth from coastal cities. This is not COVID, it's just Texas - although, the supply shock really threw things out of whack. Years prior, we always did good enough to keep supply coming online at a reasonable price. Shutdown, commodity prices, supply chain, etc destroyed that and prices.

Anecdotal, but Greater Houston differs from DFW as it's more blue collar and DFW tends to be fairly white collar/corp focused. Ironically, Houston also has much more wealth. So what this means is DFW feels like it IS middle class with some lower, some upper, and a few Mark Cuban's. Houston has a whole neighborhood of Mark Cuban's, you see lower income everywhere, and it's kind of unclear where the middle is. In the exurbs? Is exurb A a middle, upper middle, etc. it's not clear where those lines get drawn. Dallas in particular is more segregated on income (which is correlated with.. you know) with the southern part of town being almost exclusively lower income. Houston is more integrated in this regard, there are pockets of wealthy areas surrounded by lower income areas and the folks interact with each other.

I actually don't hear a ton about the big money buying here in Dallas (Zillow, etc). It's just people that sold their west coast house for $2M+ and move here cash rich. I see a lot of mid-lifers so school district & distance to office is the biggest draw for which areas are seeing the largest price gains.

Not only this, but clearly whatever zoning laws are in place are not hindering new home construction in and around Dallas. Uptown, Deep Ellum, Design District have all had enormous booms in the last few years near downtown, and Cedars is currently having a new home construction booms. That's effectively every neighborhood anywhere near the city center. So it's not like you can't build new housing inside the city limits. The biggest factor delaying the projects right now is it's too easy to become a homebuilder, so many of the people don't know what they're doing and are way behind schedule. There also seems to be a shortage of licensed tradespeople. But it isn't hard to get approval to build.

Agree, zoning laws here are not meant to hinder new construction just control it's use. However, permitting went from ~30 days to about 6-12 months in Dallas. Supply is still causing a shock and construction just takes longer now as materials get delayed, etc. and it messes everything up. The trades are less capacity. They stayed busy though lockdown, or moved back to their native country to ride it out. I know several that just never came back. There are a lot of contractors turning builders, some delay due to their inexperience, but I don't see that as a widespread issue. But all in all, you see a lot of construction around but it's actually probably less finished goods than what was occurring in 2019. The lack of property and prices means people are building on any dirt they can find. I've seen some insanely horrible tracts of land get developed because all of a sudden, prices being what they are, it now finally makes sense to invest $250K in dirt work. I've seen land that has been for sale for 10+ years due to nobody wanting a 100% flood zone get developed in the last year; again because there's nothing better available and people have the $ to fix invest in drainage.

Dallas itself is competing with it's suburbs, Plano/Frisco etc. The development you see was planned 2+ decades ago and really only a surprise to folks that don't keep up (most people, I know, but I tend to keep up with this stuff and like to buy and hold land ahead of development). Bishop Arts for example has been a 3 decade overnight success, similar story with other areas you mentioned. Many of those areas I felt like they took way longer than they should have to get developed, and it's because all money goes north to the burbs. Uptown is about as far south as most money is willing to go. Design District, Deep Ellum, Cedars are proximity plays after Uptown got kind of expensive.

I don't really do much nightlife stuff. But about 10-15 years ago, Uptown was like the young professional/college kid place to be. Many of those folks moved to the burbs after a certain age. But many stayed. Now the prices are high, it seems like it's more full of those same folks that never married, never had kids, etc and just happen to be 10-15 years older. I think it still has the reputation but realistically, younger crowds (<30 or so) don't seem to spend much time there anymore in favor of Deep Ellum, etc.

Japan definitely has zoning as well, but that wasn’t what we were debating? Just more liberal zoning vs more conservative zoning.

The only areas free of zoning that I know of are slums, shanty towns, and favelas.

If there's enough bylaws that the only building you're allowed to build is in the shape of a SFH with a driveway, that's the only thing that will get built

They don't have "zoning" just bylaws that require only certain kinds of structures to be built on certain parcels. They have zoning

This is a good summary of land use goods and bads in Houston - https://marketurbanism.com/2016/09/19/how-houston-regulates-...

Houston has a lot of other land use restrictions. I should have been more specific. Even without zoning, you have rules like floor-area-ratio, parking minimums, setback requirements, etc.

I think Japan also went into population decline... so declining demand for a existing supply of housing will rapidly lead to falling prices.

Japan is in decline as a whole, but Tokyo is still growing robustly (at a faster pace than NYC or London in fact) because of urbanization.

Tokyo actually isn’t growing that fast in population. They just construct a lot of homes there because the Japanese don’t like to buy second hand ones (so tear down the 30-40 year old house and build a new one).

40% of homes in my city were bought by institutional investors with basically cash offers that no one can compete with. They openly state the point is to corner the market on a scarce resource and drive up rents which are also up 30+%. This is clearly a problem zoning or not.

The zoning laws didn’t change in between. Japan got burned on property speculation, and no one no longer sees residential real estate as much of an investment. Also, no one wants to buy second hand structures, so your appreciation is limited to land and the existing housing on that land is a liability (buyers have to tear it down before building a new house on the land). Japan has a large amount of housing starts because they have a large amount of demolitions. Liberal zoning allows for this, for sure, but I’m not sure many Americans would be willing to go that route.

There's no reason it cant be both, and that both cant be addressed.

I think this is a "Yes, and..." situation

This sounds like something worth a deeper dive. Have you got something we can read about this?

I suggest checking out the Not Just Bikes channel on Youtube, they have a series about this.

Called "The Missing Middle" problem by strong towns.

https://nebula.app/videos/not-just-bikes-the-houses-that-can...

A clip about Houston zoning specifically is in the "Why City Design is Important (and Why I hate Houston)" video at 12:30.

https://nebula.app/videos/not-just-bikes-why-city-design-is-...

Here here.

My plan to cheap housing

1) Unfuck Zoning. Be like Texas.

2) Unfuck building codes. Person signs their own death warrant? Let them live in a yurt or a the kind of shack people keep their garden tools in. There's a county east of Tucson like this, guess what, people no ded.

3) End all subsidies and government involvement in mortgages. Best way for skyrocketing price is for government to guarantee loans in a way a relatively free market would not.

4) Permit fees dropped for building housing. Cost of evaluating permits should drop without zoning or building codes. Only examine development to make sure it doesn't cause imminent harm to those outside the property line.

This is a good list.

2) Unfuck building codes.

I think it could be greatly simplified by holding the building owner/manager criminally liable for defects that lead to major injury or death, and civilly liable for smaller defects.

There's no reason for the government to have an opinion about what type of concrete you're using or how many feet of wire you're using. They should be policing outcomes, not hiring and sending inspectors all over. If a building collapses, the people who own it and the people who built it should go to jail.

And insurance companies can come after the owners for the smaller problems.

This makes absolutely no sense.

How is "let the building collapse then send the owner to jail" an improvement over "don't let the building collapse"?

Why would we get rid of building codes, but then still jail people who don't follow the old building codes that we just got rid of. All this would accomplish is sending well-meaning people to jail, just because they didn't know their house had a serious problem, because we got rid of the building codes.

I am so confused by your rational.

The argument is probably something along the lines of "most building codes are costly but not necessary for safety" aka "it can be somehow done significantly cheaper but just as safely, a way that doesn't follow the building codes".

Not sure such a way exists...

Are you in favor of bulldozing favelas in places like Brazil if the inhabitants can't afford to fix their shanty to meet up to code?

I guess it comes down to comparing the risk of poor quality housing vs the risks of homelessness. Kind of like that saying "the real minimum wage is zero"

For many of those people, it's not a risk of homelessness but rather that they would have to rent someplace outside the favela at a much higher price, one they may be able to barely afford. Sort of like in the US, where zoning/building don't generally make people homeless but instead put a person into the situation of the favela dweller who has the option to rent while paying a large portion of their income, except without the option to build their own sub-code housing.

No one wants liability. Builders wants to build and be gone ASAP. They'll build a $350k home using the cheapest parts and labor they can find and do their best to run away with the profit. 5 years time, after any sort of warranty, their workmanship (or rather, their lack of it) starts showing.

I think your idea would be great, but there would be turmoil while the liability hot potato is thrown around until the industry figures out where that lands (probably some form of "malpractice insurance" on builders would become a thing, with higher premiums on those who suck more, eventually forcing them to be better or quit entirely).

This might have the opposite effect. Permits and building codes are there for the lender. They want assurances that the property is going to last for at least the duration of their loan. If lenders decide these deathtraps aren't worth the risk, and they have no way of offloading that risk to someone like the government, they aren't going to bite.

The entire housing industry is designed around lending. If policies are make that screw with the status quo, the industry is going to collapse then reform around the new one, and that could take decades.

We have regulations for a reason. When you blindly get rid of all of them, history repeats itself. We find ourselves looking to solve the same problems. It wasn't that long ago in the USA when entire cities would burn to the ground because a cow kicked over a lantern because lack of building codes meant buildings weren't built with safety in mind.

Everything you just wrote sounds like a good thing to me. The fact that housing is structured around lending in the US is part of the problem. It should not require a loan to get a roof over your head, and combined with zoning making basic housing illegal, there's a lot of perfectly sound shelter that cannot be legally constructed in the US.

> Permits and building codes are there for the lender.

Aight, so if I'm the lender for myself let me nix them. If they're for some third party lender, let the lender and lendee solve that through private market rather than government. Surely someone can be trained to inspect a house.

> [ mention of Great Chicago Fire ]

The classic "make hundreds millions of people work for decades to afford a house, costing tens of millions of lifespans of work so we can save 300 people once a century from the great Chicago Fire". The calculus there is way way way off.

I'll take my chances.

>It wasn't that long ago

It wasn't that long ago housing was far more affordable.

> because a cow kicked over a lantern because lack of building codes

You've fallen victim to a big tale, like santa clause. No one knows the cause of that fire. We do know that many of the conditions were completely unsubject government, such as a windy dry spell.

>We have regulations for a reason

They're there for good reasons, unfortunately the worst tyrannies and misdeeds happen at the gunpoint of those who purport to be acting for the common good. Building codes in practice are as much about taking your life away as they are as preserving it.

Building codes aren't nearly so bad as zoning and the NIMBYism that is strangling the country. There's certainly room to liberalize building codes, but I don't think the impact would be as large as one might hope. Liberalize land use please.

Zoning fixes are absolutely required, but Texas (particularly Huston) is not a good model. While many places in Texas don't have so-called 'zoning' they manage to implement pretty much all the restrictions zoning reform advocates want fixed through things like land use restrictions on deeds (which are even tougher to reform than zoning)

Japan is the model I'd like to see: inclusionary zoning. A small number of zones that allow for maximum use.

Isn’t there some small town that can be bought to test these hypotheses?

I believe that one of the things that make Texas more affordable is high property taxes. It keeps people from borrowing more money and competing as aggressively on price. So they pay in Taxes what they would be paying in interest. Taxes at least are spent in the community. Schools, roads, parks, etc.

Housing prices have little to do with property taxes, just in how the amount levied is paid by homeowners, not in the amount levied. The reason property taxes are high in Texas is for the same reason they are high in Washington state: no state income tax. That doesn’t really keep our housing prices low, however.

Texas sucks just like almost everywhere else. Oregon's reforms we're pretty aggressive though. The entire Portland metro area is zoned to at least quadplexes in residential areas, and duplexes statewide. No SFH zoning allowed. California I think only made the minimum two units.

Can you elaborate on that?

Uh, and demographics.

Japan also has a declining population, which takes a lot of pressure off of housing markets.

We could also have that, or at least level off, if we got a handle on illegal immigration.

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