First builder’s remedy plan for Bay Area revealed in Los Altos Hills

Mandating that no one is allowed to live with less than 3 parking spots per house is utterly absurd. Not every single house is going to have two adults and a teenager who all have their own car.

Developers build for whatever profits the most, and they'll avoid taking a loss just as an entrepreneur will do what they can to avoid a down round. That's why we're short millions of housing units but no one's addressing the need; developers would rather create market at the top than address low margin markets at the bottom.

> If they overbuild luxury houses, they'll go down in price.

Tons of overbuilt supply isn't doing much against new build pricing (not enough to make it affordable. 10% tops when we instead need homes that are 50+% discounted relative to market). In fact, many developers are instead subsidizing points on mortgages through preferred lenders so they can justify that original pricing, and the points are often cheaper than a market adjustment on a home.

> All new supply is good supply, period.

That's not the case when developers would rather hold than sell at a loss. See my first point and the homes going off the market waiting for housing to pick up steam again.

> We need everything from SROs to luxury penthouses. That's the only way we land on affordable housing in a market economy.

Lol. That's the extent of my rebuttal. I'm not here to debate, I apologize. But I'd advise you sit down with a few local builders to understand their strategies to maximize gain in this market; quite a few are prepared to hold as long as needed rather than build cheap and sell to lower-margin markets. And that does exactly nothing to address today's housing problem; if it was a simple matter of supply and demand, it'd have already been addressed with the vast swaths of land we've got.

    That's the only way we land on affordable housing in a market economy.

Yes, I agree with your main point: "All new supply is good supply, period." Japan is very fair about this: The cities look visually sh-tty (during the daytime) -- architectural eyesore / concreted mess... but the prices are reasonable for middle class people. Noah Smith wrote about it:

    Japanese cities like Tokyo have managed to build enough housing to make housing costs fall

And then when someone does try to improve the situation by building medium density housing in Atherton (hah, I jest, by naively trying to suggest maybe building, I mean)... you get people like Steph Curry filing objections because he might have to increase the height of his fence for privacy.

Unless developers and trusts etc. are overleveraged, they've got no incentive to dump luxe properties at below market when they know they can sell at a profit whenever the boom times come back — and this'll always be the case because impulsive or desperate buyers generally won't wait out a market. And a lot of them learned how to leverage safely after the great recession. So long as they're willing and able to attrit buyers, they'll win.

Hence why we need affordable housing mandates for the people who need and can't wait for homes — the discounts free-market proponents are projecting simply won't show up unless there's a systemic liquidity issue. And that might not happen for another 20 years now that the CRE matter is being solved with large enterprises bringing their employees back into offices.

There’s absolutely no doubt that those cities are just generally better designed and their core areas are far more aesthetic and well tended to than most American cities. But with that said the vast middle class areas of those cities where people actually live are a lot more generic and cookie-cutter than the parts people tend to see when traveling.

They have plenty of boring new construction too.

I still preferred many of those neighborhoods but that’s because driving wasn’t as heavily subsidized and so the neighborhoods have a more human scale and were safer to walk in. Looking at the neighborhood where this property is, the biggest problem I see is that there’s nothing to do. No corner markets or bars - I loved the neighborhood coffee shop/bars in Portugal and Spain, no parks, not even a bike lane or often sidewalks.

Are you saying there's a building style that's not criticized while it's being built? Could you give an example?

The rest of the paragraph instead focused on people not living Colombus, OH, which I'm not sure how you got to. The primary reason people aren't flocking to Colombus OH is because of the lack of jobs. People tend to flock places because of economic opportunity, not because of architecture.