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Comment by thworp | Hacker News Reader

I appreciate every single new housing unit being built and think public housing is generally a good idea. But recently there seems to be a trend of people wanting to fast-track zoning and permitting for public housing only, while keeping private builders stuck in the quicksand of permitting.

This is not the way mainly because the state does not have the resources to satisfy all housing demand (but also because two-tier rental markets are really unfair to newcomers). What we need is radical reforms in permitting and regulation at all levels of government (but especially at the local level). Imo the main obstacle to these reforms is that it is too easy to shout them down with talking points like "neighbourhood character", "lawn space", "shoeboxes" or "greedy developers".

If North American cities zoned a quarter of their area as 5-story midrises with large parks and mixed use and made permitting quick and easy we could really bankrupt the rent-seekers.

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> If North American cities zoned a quarter of their area as 5-story midrises with large parks and mixed use and made permitting quick and easy we could really bankrupt the rent-seekers.

I don’t believe that because it doesn’t happen in other countries that allow for 5 story midrises with large parks and mixed use and … the housing prices are often even more than North America in places that allow that in Europe and Asia. The only place with reasonable housing prices by our standards would be Japan, but housing is still expensive compared to what locals earn.

Well yes, obviously there will be a price floor on housing in a wealthy country. My point is that in recent decades the entire developed world has absolutely strangled their housing markets. Anywhere people want to move to, the wages:home prices ratio has gotten to unprecedented levels.

In Europe the reasons are slightly different. A big one is marking entire buildings, their facades or even their ornamentation as historical landmarks on a large scale (sometimes entire neighbourhoods). Buildings codes are quite a bit stricter than in the US (in all aspects, especially energy efficiency and fire code) and permitting is just as slow and vulnerable to lawsuits-after-the-fact.

The reasons I suggested midrises is because that is the style of building that was built in Europe during the late 19th / early 20th century population boom and it still holds up today (people want to live there).

European housing is expensive because people want to live there. I lived in Lausanne for two years, super expensive, although cheaper than Zurich or Geneva. Lots of mid rise housing, the only place you would see SFHs is by the lake in a very narrow corridor. Not much historical housing to consider, a lot of it was even ugly brutalesque. Yet supply still didn’t keep up with demand even according the Swiss density. Couple that with high paying jobs, and things were going to be tight. Even if you found something at a high price, you were in line with 20-50 people competing for the same rental.

American housing is on easy mode in comparison to Europe.

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