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Comment by jonfw | Hacker News Reader

public housing doesn't address the root of the problem. Housing prices are insane because it's expensive and difficult to acquire and develop land. There's two primary reasons- zoning, and speculative investment that keeps good land off of the market.

This make land very expensive to developers and limits competition. Developing, rezoning, acquiring land can take expertise and political capital. Small developers have a hard time getting involved in tight markets, where most development is now handled by the national builders on a huge scale.

We need to approach this from a different perspective. One is to kill speculative land investments with a land value tax, causing people who aren't using the land to sell off. Two is to streamline zoning and permitting processes to make it much easier for upstart developers to get started on smaller scales.

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> There's two primary reasons- zoning, and speculative investment that keeps good land off of the market.

While I agree with the second point, I’m having a hard time understanding how zoning can affect pricing. Isn’t it just “you can’t build industry next to residential”?

A significant amount of zoning is about what type of housing you can build where, how much of it you can build, and how you have to build it.

For example, in Berkeley California, which was one of the first cities to implement "exclusionary zoning" has roughly the following zoning restrictions:

* R-1: One home per lot or estate, only. Bans apartments in 49% of the city.

* R-1A: One home per lot or estate, unless the parcel exceeds 2,400 SF which allows for an additional home.

* R-2: Two homes on one parcel, only.

* R-2A: One home per every 1,650 square feet on a parcel. A typical residential parcel in Berkeley is about 5,300 square ft thus commonly three homes maximum.

[source](https://darrellowens.substack.com/p/berkeleys-upzoning-would...)

Not in the US. It is segregating cities between places people work at, places people shop at, places people live in buildings with multiple units and places where people live in single family housing, without any intermingling. Trying to build a triplex where the neighborhood might already be zoned for it, but where most of the buildings are (or seem to be) detached houses is also an uphill battle because neighbors will fight tooth and nail against "changes to the neighborhood character". This leads to the only multi family housing that has gotten built in recent history to be larger towers, which leads to what urbanists call "missing middle".

Zoning limits the density of housing. I live near an area that used to be rural, now is suburban, and zoning around here often requires more than 1 acre per house.

The major developers are able to figure out how to rezone and build houses on less than a quarter acre, but if you wanted to do it on a small scale (i.e. buy an old house on 4 acres, tear it down, and build a small subdivision instead) it's just not practical.

In more urban areas, it can be similar. But rather than requiring 1 acre per house, the restriction is that you can't build multi-family, etc.

Past methodology applied to public housing has resulted in problems. Historically the method was “how cheaply can it be made so the local building cartel can make the most profit.”

America really needs to deal with the mid-1900s mafia family like mentality still running US politics; electoral turnover flushes rent seeker politicians and their financier’s political support: https://www.nber.org/papers/w29766

The US was trending progressive before it opened it arms to post World War racists and migrants fleeing Europe. Oh what an ironic narrative their progeny babble today

it's also "you can't build multi family housing" and "you must include 1 parking spot per resident"

- You can only build single-family units (no apartments, no duplexes, etc.) - Each lot must be at least a half acre - You must have at least one (or two) parking spots per lot. - You must have multiple stairwells and an elevator for any multi-floor shared units.

And on. And on. And on. Zoning and building restrictions are an absolute gauntlet in many places. For an extreme example, check this out: https://reason.com/video/2018/12/27/san-francisco-mission-ho... (He did eventually succeed, but the cost and effort was tremendous.)

There are more people in the United States than there used to be. When I was in grade school, I learned as a child that our population was just a bit over 250 million. Google's claiming that it is 335 million right now.

Wikipedia says in the early 2000s we were at about 1 million illegal immigrants, and about another 1 million legal. I am unable to find reliable numbers for more recent years, but can it actually have gone down?

The nation could be building a million new housing units each year, and the pressure on supply wouldn't lessen. Maybe the problem isn't zoning or nimbyism or speculative investment.

We get urban sprawl and people building towns and homes in wildly inappropriate areas, such as forests. Which is why you see people's house going up in flames due to wildfire.

Meanwhile, human habitation continues to be a very small portion of land usage. We like living in metropolitan areas for a reason.

Anyway, we get a lot of benefit from immigration. I don't suggest we stop, but rather that we should adjust to demand. Nimbyism and zoning is still a problem especially with urban sprawl.

> Anyway, we get a lot of benefit from immigration.

Sure. But that doesn't mean that there's no tradeoff. Be aware of it.

We can't really talk about tradeoff of immigration if we have grossly inefficient land usage patterns and the ability to construct enough home if we so choose.

As of 2018 there were about 11M people residing illegally in the USA. That number has probably risen significantly in the past few years. Regardless of one's opinion on immigration policy it's clear that this increases demand for housing.

https://www.dhs.gov/ohss/topics/immigration/population-estim...

In my area, illegals tend to occupy low rent housing in rural areas, and there really aren't any shortages in that market. Mobile homes and places to put them are are readily available and reasonably affordable.

Illegals make such massive contributions to the construction industry that their impact on the supply curve should more than offset their impact on demand

Public housing does help address one of the roots of the problem - this is a problem with multiple roots. Public housing does not need to factor in rent seeking in their pricing, as housing is end itself, not the means to another end. It also helps address the other factor of financing housing construction at scale - build standardized and in bulk, and you bring down the price of construction, which is not insignificant.

The government is also in charge of setting zoning policy, meaning that they are better positioned to change said policy.

The landlord problem has become so bad that in some cities the renter/owner ratio is hitting 50%.

These cities become prime picking grounds for anti landlord rules.

NYC is a unique case but cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco aren't. The future will be interesting.

Housing prices are mostly insane in some places because a lot of people have decided they want to live in the same places because of jobs/culture/etc. There's at least some evidence that areas where a fair bit of development has happened over the past couple of decades because of demand still can have very expensive housing.

Cities are economically advantageous for a reason.

I don't think people are suggesting we make cities less appealing. Rather, people are advocating for measures that make cities more livable, such as investing in mass transit and reducing the amount of space inefficient car infrastructure and usage.

And yet a lot of major US cities were losing population into the late 90s. And some (like Detroit) never really recovered. Even if there are various reasons to live in an economically prosperous region, lots of people have no interest in actually living directly in a city.

Because US cities became slums, and rich people lived in the suburbs. In the rest of the world the rich people live in the cities and the poor people live in the suburbs with long commutes, there is no reason USA can't work like that as well.

Except that the US has the space and many/most people don't choose to do so--at least full-time.

Even in places where the wealthy had to live in the city, they often had summer places (in particular) elsewhere.

If you don't need to live in a city, for a lot of people (including myself), it makes a lot of sense to live elsewhere and go in for things.

I could live in a city but I have no particular reason I have to. So I choose not to at this point in time. Which is true of most of my friends as well.

“Speculative land investments” doesn’t sound dramatic enough. How about: A Land Value Tax will prevent wealthy corporations from leeching off developing communities and pushing the property market out of the grasp of young families.

There is a 3rd reason: not (fast) enough transportation infrastructure.

If you don't provide good transport infrastructure, then people must live close to work which will increase housing demand close to work, which then increase prices.

You need to plan for high speed trains, subways and metros to provide enough transportation capacity, so people can live "far away, but short travel time".

Cars are really bad at this as they take up an enormous amount of space for parking and for roads. You also cannot get much stuff done while driving a car, much easier to do work in a Japanese high speed train.

Imagine there was multiple high speed rails lines going out from Silicon Valley: how far from SF can you get in 25 minutes using 300 km/h train versus how far can you get using a car in rush hour? Housing prices in SV would be much much lower if you could get from Stockton to Mountain View in 25 minutes with reliable service and a lot of metro for "last mile" transportation.

> Imagine there was multiple high speed rails lines going out from Silicon Valley: how far from SF can you get in 25 minutes using 300 km/h train versus how far can you get using a car in rush hour?

I think people who haven’t lived with such infrastructure don’t understand that it’s not as easy as it sounds.

Sure, the train may get you from point A to B very quickly, but you still have to get between your office and the train, then from the train to your housing. That’s three trips total, unless you’re lucky enough to live right next to the stop.

And it adds up: That's actually six trips total for a single day (round trip). If they don’t line up perfectly or you miss one, that’s four different places you have to sit and wait.

This is many why people still drive even when they have access to such transport: You spend so much time going through all the transitions and in-between transits that a long drive no longer sounds so bad.

I tried to use my laptop on the train, but the best I could do was answer a few emails before packing up for the next transit step. Better than nothing, but it’s much more complicated than the internet ideal version of taking a high-speed train straight from your apartment to the office.

I have a fairly reasonable, if not especially fast (in part because lots of stops) commuter rail on the rare occasions I go into a city office. But, yeah, I have to drive to the station--only a 7 minute drive but not reasonably walkable--and then it's either about a 35 minute walk or a subway+shorter walk. It ends up being about 2 hours door to door--similar to driving.

It's more pleasant to take the train in but if I'm not sure what my schedule will be I'll still sometimes drive because the train isn't that frequent especially outside commuting hours and I can park right next to the office. And this is a city that most people, at least in the US, would consider to have a well above average transportation infrastructure---and, really, isn't bad by overall European standards.

Driving in city is sometime a terrifying experience with occasional lack of parking spots. At some point, the road quality was so terrible that it was extremely bumpy.

I prefer trains when possible, but waiting for trains can be especially long, and I am sometime bothered by people, who might be mentally ill. Also, it's very noticeable when someone smoked weed, but that's about it. There's a distinct lack of transit employees for the most part.

Increasing train frequency and service would reduce the amount of time waiting, as well increased operation budget for human interaction issues. Upzoning around transit station will make trains more sustainable. Increased social service and effectiveness will take care of peripheral issues that's not the transit agency's job to fix.

Bikes and electric scooters are good at providing last_mile access.

In Copenhagen it's free to bring bike on subway trains. So a lot of people bike from home to subway station, take the subway, and then bike the last part from subway station to work.

Bikes work in Copenhagen because of all the seperate bike paths.

The metro also work very well as it is driverless trains which means it has very low marginal cost to run more trains in rush hours (and during night time) and when there is an unexpected high demand for trains.

A better alternative would be to set state policies that encourage economic development in Stockton rather than spending $100B on high-speed rail. It's really nonsensical to keep trying to cram more people and jobs into a geographically constrained region like the Silicon Valley. There's nothing special about Mountain View.

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