I think people should expand what "desirable" means to them. There's a ton of suitable houses all over the country. Everyone seems to need to own a SFH in a trendy part of a trendy city.
I fully agree with you on prioritizing primary residence.
But, I agree on the SFH part. The expectation that a 3000sqft house on 1/4 acre is the norm is completely unsustainable. Yet that seems to be what many people want. Even in high COL areas where demand and cost should be driving density.
I concede that good schools are a major barrier. I'm young and won't be having children anytime soon so I don't think about it much.
Where I live, the public schools are pretty rough. It's cheaper to stay here and send your kids to private school rather than move to a family dominated neighborhood with excellent public schools.
Everyone wants to live in NYC, SF, DC, Miami...etc because the other areas aren't cool enough for them.
I totally get why people want that; what I don't get is why they can't understand that so many other people also want it that most everyone will have to compromise on some aspect.
Are you in CA?
True, but the restrictive zoning laws are made possible at the state level.
A thread here on HN a few weeks ago mentioned Japan which they described as having basically 5 classifications for "types of things you can do on land you own", ranging from "essentially anything at all" to "notable limitations". Within whatever classification your land is given, you can do whatever you want, local neighborhood be damned.
I don't know if that's an accurate description, but it sounds like a system with a very different set of tradeoffs than the one found across the USA.
I WFH so I could probably buy one of those houses, but most of my friends in my age bracket are expected to show up to an office 5 days a week, so those suitable houses are no good for them.
When you sit around talking about choice of living area without weighing, or even acknowledging these connections, do you realize how inhuman this sounds? Do you not have similar things binding you to a place?
Shit even specialist doctors, have you ever depended on one? If you're needing long-term specialist care you got some major shit to deal with. Rapport, trust, history with an individual doctor is an important part of that care. And people need care aside from just the doctors. Who is driving you to these appointments, caring for you afterwards? Are they coming to the new city with you?
There are a lot of things in a place you know. You can't reduce all or really very many of them down to mere transactions in a marketplace.
But life’s unfair. Houses get sold to the highest bidder. This is what happens when everyone wants to live in the same areas. I’m not arguing that you SHOULDNT be able to afford a home in your preferred spot. I’m observing that it’s IMPOSSIBLE for everyone to own property in their preferred spot within their budget.
You can still rent, or buy cheaper homes in cheaper areas in your city.
We can’t just will affordable housing into existence when ~97% of people live on ~3% of the land.
A family friend was diagnosed with a difficult brain tumor, and to get it removed via a (if memory serves, this was a while ago) gamma knife procedure, he had to drive 6+ hours north from a relatively large mid-california city up to Sacramento because we had one of the only facilities equipped for it there at the time.
In general people often will get transported to other hospitals for treatment, often multiple hours or even across state lines. Now imagine that you have to do this multiple times a month because you moved to a less-urban area due to housing prices...
1. A lot of high earners want to cram into a small space
2. The existing high earners living in that space don't want to allow more built in that space because they like the neighborhood how it is
So all these high earners compete against each other, and houses become as expensive the winning high-earning bidders can afford.
For this to stop happening, #1 or #2 needs to stop. So, either the high earners need to stop cramming into a small space, or policy must be changed so the locals can't stop the growth of housing supply.
(Usually when I've pointed this out in the past, I get mobbed by NIMBYs who insist that growing the housing supply will somehow cause prices to skyrocket even more. There seems to be a widespread NIMBY belief that standard economics doesn't apply to housing, for mysterious reasons that no one ever quite gets around to explaining. It'll be interesting to see if it happens again today.)
Land at the boundaries of a city is not equivalent with land in the centre, because of location value.
I do agree that #2 should stop, but be warned that it doesn't solve land values going sky-high; it actually increases land values. The solution is land value tax, a la Henry George.
which is what would incentivize the owner of that land (ostensibly a single family home land owner) to sell and let high density to be built. If the land doesn't increase in value this way, the owner would not have any incentive to sell.