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Comment by andrewmcwatters | Hacker News Reader

The full picture gets worse the more you look into it.

The largest home builders in the nation aren’t building homes at budgets that most can afford.

So you’d say to yourself, well clearly they’re targeting the affluent then. Except there are only so many high income Americans you can sell to, and not all of them want expensive homes.

So what do these builders do? They build-to-rent! Yep. Those single-family homes you see in many large developments you can just think of as so-called “luxury” apartments by a different name.

I suspect most developed nations experiencing this issue are effectively stuck and growth capped markets.

Truly only dedicated policy targeting this problem will make a change, because the capital required to obtain land, rezone it for traditional residential building, then sell it requires either institutional capital, or small builders doing one-offs for select clients.

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It's a stifling regulatory environment that's landed us here. Zoning is restrictive, planning commissions are slow and restrictive, councils are slow and restrictive. All of the agencies involved want to capture value from construction projects.

The net result is that very few projects pencil out, and the ones that do are expensive. We need to fix the root cause, which is lack of property rights.

Zoning for who? America has no issue with single family zoning.

I’m assuming you’re speaking about middle and high density zoning. Since the issues you're describing are extremely common for those zoning projects.

If you're the property owner it should be easy for you to build whatever level of residential density you want and think the market will make profitable. Why is it illegal for me to build townhouses on my land?

I'm in an area where it takes, on average, 1.8 acres per single family home. The next town over would put 18 single family homes in that same space. Zoning is restrictive even for single-family homes.

I don't think that's a particularly representative example. Zoning is determined locally in the U.S., and taking the most extreme locality doesn't really shed light on what's going on in the country as a whole, and isn't a useful avenue to approach this problem. Try instead to work with averages and representative localities. The U.S., like any area, has urban, suburban, and rural areas, with a continuous gradient in between. No point in discussing rural or near-rural areas when complaining about zoning, since the real issue is that people in urban areas need access to jobs. People living on the horse farms or rural ranches are not the problem here, and liberalizing zoning in Asheville isn't going to make housing more affordable in Austin or San Francisco, which is where the pain of restrictive zoning is felt.

Zoning density is based partially on supporting infrastructure. If low density suddenly becomes higher density, will the roads be able to handle the additional vehicles/trips? Probably not, so who will cover costs to improve the roads so individuals can build multiple townhomes in their property?

This is precisely what impact fees are for when applying for building permits.

> If you're the property owner it should be easy for you to build whatever level of residential density you want and think the market will make profitable. Why is it illegal for me to build townhouses on my land?

Isn't the entire concept of externalities in economics that things aren't that simple? Presumably you agree that your neighbor shouldn't be able to build a sewage treatment plant next to your house.

From what I can tell most economists will actively go out of their way to ignore externalities. For some externalities there are even market based methods for getting rid of them yet curiously almost no economist is interested in these types of institutions.

Sewage treatment plants are not residential construction.

Move to Texas and you can literally do this. There is no zoning. Go ahead and build those townhouses on your land. Your next door neighbors might build a strip club or pesticide manufacturing plant, though.

Even if you luck out with your current neighbors, the addional risk will lead to worse terms for you if you need investors to finance the project.

The claims about zoning and property rights can be examined in the US, as Texas has no zoning. Housing costs are not remarkably different there.

The "capturing of value" that is actually happening is a net transfer of land and wealth from the general population to a handful of massive corporations and the people who control them. Once they own everything and have dismantled the market they can charge whatever they want.

This is a misunderstanding of how pricing works. The homes that are beig built aren't expensive because they're fancy, they're expensive because they're scarce and people need them, so they bid against each other. Every building markets itself as "luxury", but this is in fact just marketing. In principle you could make units cheaper by dividing them up into units with less floor space, but that people are already renting the larger units in groups.

Agree. The luxury finishings are in fact quite cheap.

Expensive because they are new as well. Also even if you did constantly target the top end of the market. The people moving in moved out of somewhere else which has freed it up for others.

>So you’d say to yourself, well clearly they’re targeting the affluent then. Except there are only so many high income Americans you can sell to

They're targeting high net worth individuals looking for a store of value (or, in some cases, a foothold/bolthole from their repressive government).

High income Americans are to these flats what jewellery/smartphones are to gold - the underlying use value that, combined with natural scarcity, drives the hoarding instinct.

It's quite possible to pull the rug out from under the feet of the ultrawealthy by instituting a steep land value tax. This would kill the hoarding instinct, kill the NIMBY instinct and drive more efficient use of land.

I don’t know anyone buying new development housing as an alternative to marketable securities.

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