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Comment by panny | Hacker News Reader

I'm not going to say zoning isn't a problem, but the article admits "Minneapolis, for instance, experienced limited development after eliminating single-family zoning."

I think the problem is less about zoning and due more to the number of people around who can build houses. Everyone went off to college to be a white collar worker and there just isn't a lot of plumbers and electricians per capita anymore. And that's not easy to fix. You can't even import these sort of people because of licensing, bonding, insurance, etc regulations that exist on these blue collar workers now. It's an uphill battle trying to change any of those regulations too, because insurance companies will fight you.

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A lot of construction workers left the industry during the 2008 crash, and the way talent grows (via apprenticeships) we were bound to have a shortage during the current boom. If we could even out the boom bust nature of the industry, maybe we could lead to more stable availability of trades talent.

You can make it easier to supply housing, but you also need demand. I don’t expect there is terribly high demand for housing in Minneapolis. Especially compared to the cities with the highest rates of housing shortages.

>I don’t expect there is terribly high demand for housing in Minneapolis.

Why not? Why wouldn't people want to live a city with such beautiful weather year-round??? /s

You might be surprised. The population of Minneapolis grew 12.4% in the 2010s. That's higher than NYC has grown in any decade since the 30s and higher than Houston, Dallas, and Phoenix. It's no Austin or Orlando, but…

Though, in fairness, that's after a lot of decades of little to no growth. The population of the city of Minneapolis is still less than it was in the 50s. (Though the metro area has grown steadily.)

> And that's not easy to fix.

no, but the simplest fix is to increase the wages of those trades - which is currently what is happening, and also why the expense of building is growing. Unfortunately, this fix takes a long time to take effect (approx. a generation).

A friend of mine wanted to be an electrician, but once he realized he'd be working minimum wage in an apprenticeship for four years, he went back to school for a white collar job instead.

That's the real bottleneck.

So instead of doing minimum wage during training, he opted to go into negative wage (debt), and the potential outcome is not higher with a collage degree.

I think it’s worse than a single generation because you need wages to be competitive for long enough that people are encouraging their children to try it. A good decade won’t do that, and especially not without improvements in our healthcare and retirement systems since physical trades are harder and the richer boomers are pushing to deal with the savings gap by raising the retirement age for everyone younger than them rather than restoring taxes to actuarily-necessary levels. Being a plumber at 60 isn’t for everyone.

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