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Comment by RationPhantoms | Hacker News Reader

keyword is affordable housing. Mansions/million-dollar condos are still being developed.

There was a post on hacker news about this. Study in Finland showed it doesn't matter the type of housing, if it's luxury people move up and out of what they are currently in and the people below follow. Not surprising really, it's just supply and demand.

At some point, you run out of land with reasonable commute times.

Cities aren’t black holes that cause all job locations to collapse into a singularity. If density were allowed to grow you’d find jobs appearing in other places (and the biggest cities have this already - the jobs aren’t only in the central metro area).

We have the technology to stack dwellings on top of each other. If commute times become unreasonable we also have the technology to reduce it, with trams or rail. Even better build the commute infrastructure first and then the housing but Singapore and Manhattan show pretty clearly what’s possible. Shanghai didn’t have a metro system 20 years ago. Now it’s the world's biggest.

But that is what falls into "affordable housing" category. Comment I reacted to said it is not needed, because people move.

It doesn't all fall into affordable housing category, people are complaining in London about new luxury high rise apartments because they are high end and "not affordable".

This is a problem, where we effectively don’t allow multi family or cheap apartments in many areas and only allow expensive single family units. However I believe California housing supply is so far behind demand that even expensive units are desirable to alleviate pressure on less expensive units, that people might otherwise compete for.

Most of the new housing I see built are 5-over-1s. Giant 6 story apartment buildings built on already busy streets.

What California needs is flexible zoning to allow mixed-use medium density development connected by safe bicycling paths and public transit.

Too much space is taken by automobile parking and there is too far of a distance between places people live and the grocery stores, shopping areas, and gyms they frequent.

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