Comment by lwansbrough | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lwansbrough | Hacker News Reader

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In my opinion, there can only be one solution to this that will come sooner or later. A great correction following simplified zoning & building legislation. Federal governments across the west need to take control of building and zoning. Planning can remain a city/state/provincial affair, but it must be done under standardized and simplified building and zoning legislation. We are wasting unfathomable economic potential on rising housing costs, rent seeking, and artificially limiting economic development in urban centres.

It is probably exceptionally challenging to manage the economic fallout from such a correction, but I believe it has to happen. I would also support draconian measures which would forcibly and retroactively destroy accrued home value to ensure we haven't extracted wealth from the younger generations. I realize this is unprecedented and probably unconstitutional, but that's my emotional response to the problem. It is plain as day: Boomers extracted the wealth out of the country and now they're extracting the wealth out of their kids. It has to be stopped.

We had a response like this in New Zealand a few years ago, with the central government putting in place MDRS rules that forced councils to approve medium density housing pretty much anywhere a developer wanted to put it. For context, NZ is pretty heavily weighted towards single family dwellings, and our house prices are amoung the highest in the world.

It has been extremely effective. Of course you can never determine the actual effect of a policy like this in such a noisy environment, but everyone agrees it has contributed towards increased supply and falling prices, especially in Auckland. In the city I live in townhouses were almost unheard of, and now they're popping up everywhere.

Federal would require constitutional change, so it'll never happen.

But it's the right idea -- move it up the chain so that it's not a hyper-local issue. IOW, at the state level rather than city/county. This has seen some success in California: https://cayimby.org/legislation/

The Canadian government is currently facing this problem. Provinces have constitutional authority over building and zoning. One way they're trying to get around it (though in my opinion, no party is taking this seriously and all efforts thus far have fallen laughably short of where they need to), is by incentivizing the adoption of federal policy by conditioning federal housing grants on the adoption of new federally guided policy.

This is the way for the west, if we're being serious. Once we've taken a few breaths and accepted that we don't want to be authoritative, we can see that incentivizing provinces is the right move.

In my opinion, the federal government should be designing simplified building and zoning guidelines and offering unprecedented grants (on the order of tens of billions) to provinces in a first come first serve manner. Have provinces compete on urgency to receive the most funds, tapering off the offer the longer provinces hold out.

The BC government has been relatively successful at this. Housing prices in Vancouver used to be ~2X those of Toronto; now Toronto is more expensive than Vancouver.

The Ontario Housing Affordability Task Force released a list of 55 things to do to reduce housing prices. BC has implemented a far larger share of that 55 than Ontario has.

> In my opinion, the federal government should be designing simplified building and zoning guidelines and offering unprecedented grants (on the order of tens of billions) to provinces in a first come first serve manner. Have provinces compete on urgency to receive the most funds, tapering off the offer the longer provinces hold out.

That's basically what they're doing. They can't change zoning without changing the constitution, but they are giving out tens of billions of dollars conditional on appropriate zoning changes. BC has received lots of money that way, Toronto has bypassed the province to get theirs and Alberta has made it illegal for Calgary & Edmonton to access theirs.

I’ll keep shouting this from the rooftops: while it may contribute in some areas, zoning laws are not the primary cause of home prices increasing like they have. For proof, look at any rural (and I mean actual rural) area and how their home prices have also been skyrocketing.

It’s supply and demand, with other things being small factors. We either need to vastly increase supply across the entire country somehow, or cut down on demand. The latter is a hell of a lot easier than the former. For some reason it’s ok to talk about this in the context of Canada and how their mass immigration has increased home prices, but that applies to almost everywhere. Japan literally has homes they’re trying to give away.

> For proof, look at any rural area and how their home prices have also been skyrocketing.

Yes, it is supply and demand. And zoning is the largest component of the supply function. If you fix zoning, you fix supply, approximately. Outdated fire code, etc. are also important factors.

> or cut down on demand

This is called degrowth and it's how you destroy an economy.

> Japan literally has homes they’re trying to give away.

I'm not sure what point you were trying to make by invoking Japan -- Japan notoriously solved their housing crisis by abolishing the regressive zoning practices at the time and made basically everything one big mixed use zone. The reason why Japan is giving away houses these days is because everyone moved to the cities because that's where the economic opportunity is. And that's where people who contribute to the economy want to be -- where the economic opportunity is.

Zoning is only the largest component of the supply function in major cities. My point is that I could build as much freaking housing as I wanted where I live, of whatever type I wanted. Our local population numbers are relatively stable. Yet prices have still been surging. Why?

I said cut down in demand, not go into full depopulation. That said, at some point we’re going to need to deal with that. We can’t just keep on importing people from the third world forever to offset people making less babies. Just aim for, say - an increase of population of 1% a year. Right now it’s completely uncontrolled and people are somehow shocked that housing prices are out of control.

Even in Tokyo home prices aren’t bad, and that’s with their culture of tearing down and rebuilding every 30 years. My real point though was that the same is true here - most economic opportunities are in cities. Yet our rural housing isn’t getting cheaper, and it’s increasing in cost almost as much as (most) urban centers.

> zoning laws are not the primary cause of home prices > We ... need to vastly increase supply across the entire country somehow

Zoning laws reduce available supply by making it illegal or impossible (due to e.g. parking minimums) to build densely in most of the bigger cities in North America

> For some reason it’s ok to talk about this in the context of Canada and how their mass immigration has increased home prices

1. It's not okay to scapegoat immigrants 2. Canada hasn't built enough housing to keep up with a growing population, largely due to exclusionary zoning policies. The vast majority of land in Vancouver is reserved for SFHs, even within walksheds of skytrain stations representing billions of dollars in Provincial investment.

I know it’s hard for people that live in cities, but you all can’t see the forest for the trees. Even when talking about Canada’s issue you say they haven’t been able to make enough housing…in cities.

First off, they can’t make enough housing anywhere. There are only so many home builders, and at least in the US up until the last year they’ve all been absolutely swamped. It takes time for more people to learn trades.

When housing is cheap enough outside of cities people move there instead. We see it happen all the time, and it’d happen even more if rural home prices also weren’t going up like they have been - especially now that working from home is here to stay for plenty of companies.

Supply and Demand is a function of zoning, because more supply cannot happen without the correct zoning happening.

I wish you could go outside my house right now and look around.

Guess what - there’s basically no zoning here. There’s land. If I wanted to put up a 30 story apartment building I could, though I suppose what few neighbors I have might make a stink about it, and it probably wouldn’t make sense when everyone here lives on at least 5 acres.

Yet - somehow, amazingly, prices are still going up. We have a severe supply/demand mismatch in the country that drives prices up across the board.

The individual States have the power to do this, you don't need to get the Federal government involved (nor would you want to). It is also much simpler at the State level, since the solutions can be tailored to local conditions and you don't need to get nearly as many people living far away to agree with you to get anything done.

Without demonstrating success at the much more achievable State level, there is no way it will work at the Federal level, even ignoring the obvious Constitutional issue.

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