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Comment by fragmede | Hacker News Reader

subsidies for construction is the obvious answer that we're too stupid to be able to implement.

Completely unnecessary. With prices that high developers are very happy to construct things.

All that's necessary is for the government to get out of the way. i.e. dramatically reduce zoning and permitting requirements.

Homebuyers and developers want construction. Governments and NIMBY's don't want it.

but they're not. They're building luxury condos because they pay out the most and they need to do that because the cost of construction is so high. if the cost of construction was lower, then it would be affordable to do non-luxury non-condo construction.

If that's even true it's only because they are so limited in what they can build.

Remember there's a limit to how many of those can be sold. Once you've sold them all they'll build sometime else

But only if the government lets.

Subsidizing a heavily regulated industry sounds like a good way to waste a lot of money.

Construction is expensive but at least not difficult. Entitlement and permitting are the real nightmare here. It's why we basically don't build anything.

what about the massive amount of housing starts that dropped off after the financial crisis and took a while to recover, and never got back to the same level? that seems like a big part of the problem too. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/HOUST

How many of those are in California?

idk, i'm curious but ain't got time to look for that. you should look it up if you're curious, or are you trying to make a point?

The article is about California and I would suspect that relatively few entitled projects are abandoned there. If you know where to get the relevant data, please share.

that would be the "we're too stupid" part

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