Cancel Zoning If we want to fix the housing-affordability crisis zoning must go
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If you want to see the opposite of that, come to Vermont. Even if we can get a building approved there's nobody around to build it, and even if there was the cost of their labor is beyond the economic capacity of the region. The sooner we start issuing work visas for construction, the faster we will get out of the housing crisis.
Texas is a red state of course, and there's a lot of irony in how proud Texans are of their Tex-Mex cuisine and low housing prices.
It's hard to say. It's a multifactor problem.
I don’t understand why we are stuck in this loophole of zones, affordable housing and so on. There is plenty of space!
The government could build those homes too if they really cared about it. Heck! Soviet Russia built a bunch of complexes for people to live in, sure they won’t be pretty, but better than sleeping outside. But somehow we can’t build them here in the US and we’d rather spend years and decades discussing existing zoning laws when new ones could be established pretty much all over the nation.
The reason more isn’t being built is zoning.
Permitting can be time consuming (though largely this is a function of zoning and what variances the developer is looking for in order to get to an economic density - which is nearly never “as of right - and what level of community involvement exists in approving these variances) but rarely would permitting on its own be a barrier (it would be the underlying zoning and the NIMBYism that prevents the variances).
Sounds like you’re in favour of cancelling zoning. Cancelling just means a reevaluation of how and where we allow housing developments on existing space. It means cancelling that ineffective structure system and replacing it with something more appropriate. It means getting to actually build housing on space that didn’t allow it for reasons we’re now questioning and challenging.
No sane ISP is going to invest in fiber connections to "middle of nowhere". ISPs invest in areas where the money is likely to be in.
That's not even including the other challenges that the other person wrote; sparse areas tend to have less investments in their infrastructure as well.
People live closer to the city for all sorts of reasons; health cares systems are better, more public infrastructure in place (think cops, libraries, public transportation, etc).
So yea, not surprised folks are signing up in droves to go live in Middle of Nowhere America.
And the reason we can't build where people need them is mostly zoning.
The issue is traditional working practices. People are forced to cluster in large cities, as opposed to spreading around, particularly where jobs can be done remotely. There's literarly no need to have software engineers, marketing and sales people, customer support, accountants, etc in city offices. This is an issue all over the world where work hasn't adopted modern practices.
* Building houses on federally-owned land in the middle of rural Oregon
* Switching everybody to a plant-based diet
* Allowing all the white-collar knowledge workers to work remotely so they'll migrate out of the cities.
I'm sure we'll get other creative ideas too. But eliminating single-family zoning seems a lot simpler.
To your point about big single offices where all of these workers are “in the city” which mostly are spread out suburban office parks, I would agree, which is why we need less sprawl and more people living closer together and clustering around the cities that they are residing in.
Seriously, this problem doesn’t exist in other places. It has been solved 70 years ago in rest of the civilized world.
Both of these would be excellent norms to import into America, but it would come with fierce resistance from the most-likely-to-vote segments of society. I don’t see it happening.
In my country, there's an even longer list of exceptions to the zoning rules, and that's just at the federal level. I bet in some jurisdictions, a city council can modify these rules by simply adding an exception for a specific area, block, or development.
City planning has to be one of the most underestimated tasks for city officials. No one can really predict what will happen to a city in the near future. Just think about how many cities were *totally* unprepared for COVID in 2020. An official might have an idea as of how the city should grow in the next 10 years, but in lots of places there's an equilibrium easily disrupted by political shifts, economic downturns, or simply global dynamics that have faster impacts than what city officials can anticipate or comprehend.
Obviously some places don’t have it and it works out fine: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Fertilizer_Company_expl...
Getting rid of zoning doesn’t suddenly make more trades. Plumbers, roofers, and electricians are in short supply because the gfc wiped them out.
Why not better, simpler zoning with well understood and simple rules for changing the zoning?
Eliminating zoning entirely is reactionary and going too far.
What we do need is to just pull zoning back. Really it’s just a few changes. Don’t require single family homes with yards. Allow high density residential and also allow mixed zoning where you have apartments on top of small commercial spaces. Also, remove parking minimums. That’s really going to cover 90% of the issues.
Where every single building needs state permission and full review to be built. Which takes months to years per building, instead of days or weeks.
In completely unrelated news the UK has some of the most expensive smallest housing in Europe.
Everything is everywhere, in exactly the same way. City-sized concrete strip mall, indeed.
Zoning has its faults.
But lack of coherent zoning also has its faults.
But zoning is often abused as a way to protect and increase the value of landowners’ assets at everyone else’s expense.
So you are missing a lot.
No, I prefer National Forests that are open to my recreation than barbed wire and no trespass signs.
Let's begin by acknowledging the vast middle ground between the two extreme positions and also downsides of population density.
What does utopia look like for mice? According to a researcher who did most of his work in the 1950s through1970s, it might include limitless food (of course!), multiple levels and secluded little rodent condos. These were all part of John Calhoun’s experiments to study the effects of population density on behavior. But what looked like rat utopias and mouse paradises at first quickly spiraled into out-of-control overcrowding, eventual population collapse and seemingly sinister behavior patterns.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/how-mouse-utopias-...
The vast majority of federal land is BLM, which by its very nature is not desirable for development.
I could go camp on BLM land today in eastern Colorado, it just wouldn't be very nice, because it's scrub brush all the way to Kansas City (exaggerating, only slightly).
Go camp for a month on BLM land somewhere and see if it's a place you'd like to build a town.
Otherwise you're proposing building on protected public lands which I for one would prefer to remain natural.
You can still homestead parts of Alaska. If you can develop the land it's yours to keep, and I do imagine that the feds let go BLM land on occasion, but it's not going to solve housing as suggested up-thread.
If we'd switch to plant based diets, we would globally free an area the space of both Americas. If this area were reforested/rewilded, we'd store enough carbon to stop climate change, stop biodiversity loss, droughts, soil erosion, eutrophication and anthropogenic oceanic dead zones, and we'd still have plenty of space to build housing for everybody.
https://ourworldindata.org/land-use
https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets
https://ourworldindata.org/drivers-of-deforestation
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/320356605_Agricultu...
https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/press-release/our-glob...
The same with the most desirable place to live? Is it an infinitely desirable spot or an infinite amount of space?
In any case unlimited wants in a finite system will always create compromises; especially if there are multiple actors.
When developers are allowed to build apartments, they build luxury apartments.
As long as profit is the motive, the affordability half is likely to be neglected.
I also feel like building more rental properties serves the property owners more than it does the "dweller".
"These are just for-profit developers building luxury apartments" is the single most common objection to new multifamily housing where I live. The irony of it is that it's always coming from single-family homeowners, all of whom practically by definition live in spaces more luxurious than any of the proposed apartments.
All new apartments are described as luxury. It's makes them easier to sell.
If land prices are high and it takes years to get approval to build then only expensive apartments will be built because cheap apartments won't make a profit.
If only expensive housing is allowed to be built then most people will only be able to afford to rent.
Which is what you'd expect to happen in a free market.
Absent a reason, why would developers voluntarily choose to build an option that would make them less money?
Either way refusing to allow apartments to be built because you fear they will be "luxury" is dumb. It just means that the only people who get to live there are the really rich who can afford a full-sized house.
So only 60+ stories towers gets built since the initial permitting cost is the same.
With less restrictive zoning, more properties and building projects become financially feasible with the banks, builders, and contractors we already have. It costs the government zero money and happens automatically with the stroke of a pen.
It's much more difficult to re-engineer our entire mode of government, taxation, and housing provision than simply removing a few legal restrictions.
Look at Texas - zoning-free, no rent control, and it’s quickly becoming a housing dystopia. Prices are rising rapidly, and as you build out so quickly, your taxes rise as a clip more than twice most places, to build new schools and hire teachers and build roads, etc. and guess what? Private equity firms are snapping up homes at a huge clip, 25% nationally and much higher in Texas, and then rent them out according to algorithms that maximize their profits (in collusion with other landlords using the same software). Why build a Rube Goldberg machine to impact housing prices though the elimination of zoning, when you can affect it directly through rent control and directly incentivizing new construction of cheap units?
That was kind of my point. The burgeoning middle class had nothing to do with rent control laws.
Anyways, most of the research I'm finding contradicts your assertions.
For example, a recent paper [0] about on the housing market in Helsinki found that "new market-rate construction loosens the housing market in middle- and low-income areas even in the short run".
About restrictive zoning _not_ being an issue, a graph from a paper [1] illustrates that Los Angeles is at 92% of its zoned capacity when it had a planned capacity in the 1960s that was more than double what its current actual capacity is. From the paper: "Areas with well-organized homeowner groups dramatically decreased density as a means of controlling population growth, thus directing the future growth of L.A. to predominately low-income, minority communities - communities least able to accommodate that growth due to overcrowded housing, under-performing schools, limited park space and, in many cases, poor transit access. In short, density was directed to the path of least political resistance, a social injustice that exacerbated spatial disparities between communities." The paper asserts that, beyond the racial disparities caused, restrictive zoning has caused rent to become unaffordable and has had a negative environmental impact.
On the topic of rent control generally, one paper [2] estimates that NYC rent controls caused a 20% misallocation of rental units. Another [3] about rent controls in SF found "that landlords whose properties were exogenously covered by rent control reduced their supply of available rental housing by 15%, by either converting to condos/TICs, selling to owner occupied, or redeveloping buildings. This led to a city-wide rent increase of 5.1% and caused $2.9 billion of total loss to renters."
And this general survey [4] found "that economic research quite consistently and predominantly frowns on rent control. [The] findings cover both theoretical and empirical research on many dimensions of the issue, including housing availability, maintenance and housing quality, rental rates, political and administrative costs, and redistribution." In short, “the economics profession has reached a rare consensus: Rent control creates many more problems than it solves.”
[0] https://ideas.repec.org/p/fer/wpaper/146.html
[1] https://i.imgur.com/EIyespr.png from https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6k64g20f#page-1
[2] https://users.nber.org/~luttmer/rentcontrol.pdf
[3] https://econpapers.repec.org/paper/redsed018/918.htm
[4] https://econjwatch.org/File+download/238/2009-01-jenkins-rea...
To be clear, I support policies that theoretically decrease homelessness and increase affordable housing. I too have difficulties acquiring housing. I want to know these policies actually have evidence now that they’ve been enacted.
Think of the car owners feelings! But seriously, having fewer parking spaces can incentivize better non-car transportation options (public transport and bike lanes/paths for example). Turns out that higher density areas with non-car transportation options are hugely popular and pleasant places to live.