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Comment by yahway | Hacker News Reader

The problem with ant zoning laws is that they pick winners and losers. They need abolished state-wide to ever have a true affect. Otherwise, these limited pockets get bought up by investors and again, are limited to tiny areas. Abolish it state wide and people will over build and then true affordability will return.

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This bill barely passed (they got a majority +1, which they needed to pass) so a further reaching bill might have been difficult to sell.

The LA area in particular, has some really bad elected officials in terms of housing.

> The LA area in particular, has some really bad elected officials in terms of housing.

LA in particular? Naaah, mate. Those elected officials are fucking everywhere.

Yours, an Eu resident.

In this case specifically, northern California was mostly in favor, and the wider LA area was mostly against. I almost said southern California, but actually San Diego was in favor too.

The optimistic view is that a lot of small spots of dense housing exposes more people to it, which in time could lead to more people being in favor of zoning additional land for dense housing

Correct, given that housing in one location is significantly fungible with housing in another location, barring some economic frictions. The total stock (both state-wide and nation-wide) is the metric that needs to be increased.

> Correct, given that housing in one location is significantly fungible with housing in another location, barring some economic frictions

What do you mean by economic friction, because in real estate, “location, location, location” is the most important phrase.

The economic opportunities available to someone in living within 1 hour of SF and San Jose are vastly different to someone living 4 hours away, hence the house in one location is not fungible with the house in another.

Even on the more local level, the school district a house is located in will make a big difference.

I think they're talking about a matter of blocks, not hours of transportation.

Is "ant" antiquated? Zoning is a good thing. If you abolished all zoning, construction would be completely disorganized as it was in the California Gold Rush.

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