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Comment by jefftk | Hacker News Reader

The problem of expensive housing in locations where housing construction is somewhere between heavily restricted and entirely prohibited is bad in the US but not limited to the US. Most rich countries have this problem.

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The problem is always expensive housing where people want to live. The zoning doesn’t make the housing expensive itself, the desirability of the location does. No one ever complains about zoning in Detroit or Cleveland.

Housing can actually be fairly affordable in Europe. Berlin until about 5 years ago had incredibly affordable housing for such a nice city…then it simply got more popular until that wasn’t the case anymore. Tokyo would have similar problems if its population wasn’t actually shrinking now (as are Nagoya and Osaka), since it’s a nice place to live, and housing isn’t very restricted beyond having to rebuild everything every 30 (SFH) to 50 (apartments) years.

Bad zoning prevents price signals from leading to increased density and thus increased supply in areas of high demand.

San Francisco should look like Hong Kong or Tokyo. If you want a quaint small town move to a quaint small town. World cities are not small towns and trying to contain them to preserve their “character” just leads to affordability crises and homelessness among other problems.

If Detroit suddenly became a hot place to live and it wasn’t upzoned the same problems would start happening there.

Hong Kong is more expensive than San Francisco. Is your claim that Hong Kong zoning prevents affordable housing? It doesn’t get much better across the bay in Shenzhen either (if you are buying rather than renting, as is true with most mainland cities).

My point is that, with few exceptions, housing is always expensive in places that are popular. If you want affordable housing, turn your city into Cleveland, don’t turn it into Hong Kong.

Agree a little bit. But also, it seems like there are many powerful people in San Francisco, people like Nancy Palosi, and they don’t want, the city from becoming Mumbai or Hong Kong or whatever it is you think it should be. You seem to want to limit wealthy people like her from participating in the political in a way that protects their interests. Even if you can somehow prevent individuals from impacting politics, groups like the California Coastal Commission will still pop up to represent nearly identical interests to those of individual landowners. The environment matters to poor folks too.

Yeah, we really need to go out of our way to make sure Nancy Pelosi has a say in our political process.

What if one of the most powerful politicians alive doesn't get to make this particular decision? She'll be so disenfranchised!

> Housing can actually be fairly affordable in Europe. Berlin until about 5 years ago had incredibly affordable housing

You mean to rent?

What about people who want to buy a home, have space, and have generational wealth?

You are unlikely to find that in Berlin or any major western city.

The only places to buy withing reach of the middle class are tens to hundreds of KMs out of these cities.

That’s true. You might as well include all of mainland China in cheap to rent but impossible to buy.

> Berlin until about 5 years ago had incredibly affordable housing for such a nice city

Berlin, and may I add Vienna, are anomalies. Vienna's population peaked in 1910. Berlin's population peaked in 1943. They were both capitals of an empire at their peak time. Then they became less important, and their population decreased. Now they have been in a very unique situation with their new population growth, because they already were designed for a larger population.

You can't generalize from Berlin and Vienna to other, more normal, cities.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Population_of_Vienna.svg

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin#/media/File:Berlin_popu...

Yes. I’ve heard Berlin has been pricing up lately regardless. Maybe they’ve already worked through their historic inventory.

This makes a lot of sense. I think my own city (Glasgow) used to be considerably larger when it was an industrial powerhouse in shipbuilding and textiles and has fairly cheap housing nowadays as a result.

It's been getting a bit more expensive due to Chinese students and also people moving north from England but it's still very affordable compared to most places.

True if you look at the cities, but it misses the bigger picture. There was also a trend of people moving into the surrounding suburbs and smaller towns, and commuting to the inner city. If you look at the metro area, both have actually grown.

https://www.macrotrends.net/cities/204296/berlin/population

https://www.macrotrends.net/cities/20107/vienna/population

Not sure about Berlin but in the case of Vienna, social housing and legislation (Mietrechtsgesetz) are big factors. 25% of Vienna’s population lives in social housing which in turn regulates the market.

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