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Comment by locacorten | Hacker News Reader

I wonder what would be a really effective incentive to the construction industry to build more homes.

Something like -- no tax on any homes construction for the next 5 years. Wouldn't that create a construction boom?

The first step is to legalize a much broader array of housing types. Apartments, condos, small lots, townhomes, cottage clusters... all of it.

I'm involved in housing advocacy locally, and a huge impediment to building more is zoning and NIMBYism.

Zoning should be used to keep factories out of neighborhoods, nothing more. Also, building code is making houses boring. Should be a third-party standard, like UL.

It kind of is. Most places just adopt the IBC and make a few amendments.

You can't build if you don't have the labor. There are half a million open construction jobs [0].

People forget that most construction companies went bankrupt in the aftermath of 2008.

[0] - https://www.abc.org/News-Media/News-Releases/construction-wo...

The limits are: Getting people willing to work in the industry (a lot of it is hard labor for okay but not great pay). Zoning which doesn't allow you to build at all in high demand places. Building codes that sometimes require things that don't make sense. Places where builders can get permits "by right" tend to have a lot more building and thus much lower housing prices.

If that created a construction boom, then it would be a boom of constructing very expensive housing, not affordable housing. At least, that's what would happen if recent history is anything to go by.

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