I don't think all building regulations should be put aside but we have a crisis something needs to give.
All housing is now very carefully planned top-down. The only ones who get past all the red tape are high end condos or far-off single-family suburbs. So city government's only idea is to force each of those fancy buildings to have a subset of units as affordable housing. The supply of those is never enough to keep up. Government made buildings now take forever or straight up fail.
Out of sympathy they removed an option for the very-poor and haven't come up with a replacement solution.
That doesn't seem like a fair take. You're implying that the sympathetic people who outlawed poor houses are the very same people who won't build anything new. That's not true.
Democratic politics will always be about compromise. Compromise means you don't get do all your Y's. It's the purpose of the system. We will never (I hope) live in either the libertarian nor the socialist utopia, not just because neither of those places really exist, but also because democracy doesn't lead to that.
If you every find yourself thinking that "this problem would be solved if only we were closer to my utopia" then you're the ideological one.
Yes, agencies are people. If you think that it's dishonest to castigate the SFHA for taking one action and not taking another because the one action was a little while ago and therefore there's been some personnel churn since, you are being unserious. Have you ever complained about past and present actions of e.g. Microsoft?
Haven't really heard about this crisis. Are you referring to the US?
There's specific pages for some individual countries, too:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Housing_crisis_in_the_United_S...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affordable_housing_in_Canada#A...
At least in Europe it is not (yet?) causing very large scale of homelessness problem.
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c9vg923vkdko [2] https://www.irishtimes.com/ireland/housing-planning/2025/03/...
This website has been often prone to "social justice" recently, I'm amazed somebody can get away with such an idiotic comment without being flagged to hell.
Houses are "carefully planed" because you don't want poor people to die in them due to poor construction, carbon monoxide when they need heat during winter, or a fire that would spread to other houses due to cheap materials, that's why,you know, the stuff that happens regularly in third world slums, but you can't fathom that fact.
They are there to outsource inspection costs to tax payers for the banks to protect their loans on the houses themselves.
And help nimbys protect property values.
And create more bureaucracy for former contractors as most inspectors are.
And reduce competition for existing contractors.
And increase revenues for housing materials retailers.
Housing regulations have zero benefit to the people who live in the house or don't live in the house because there aren't enough houses so people die in the cold.
"Slums" in the west are mostly just old apartments that used to be middle class or cheap buildings in less 'desirable' locations. They aren't people living in shacks.
In a housing shortage those old buildings which would normally decline in rent still cost $2000/m in many cities like Toronto due to lack of supply. And no developer can afford all the headaches just to build a new affordable low-rent buildings either.
Your "solutions" are so cynical you really want homeless people to die.
I would have taken that position when I was younger so I won't be too critical. But IRL trusting centrists politicians to spend that money properly and actually build mass housing is mostly a pipe dream. They can't even build a single railroad in the country let alone hundreds of thousands of houses in the city proper.
Radicals rarely take government for long... and as long a capitalism is the only true wealth generator for the public I wouldn't gamble on the far-left being the party that achieves that rare feat (absent a dictatorship).
It's easier to just campaign for government to do less instead of more. Just let people build things they need. There's already massive pent up demand and private capital ready to build housing the second government lets them. It doesn't need risky advertising for more taxation.
People generally don't realize how much of the regulatory apparatus in the US comes from racist origins.
There is no/litte discussion about the trade-offs.
You have to see the other side, then weigh all pros and cons and then make a decision.
In most cases regulation is sold as something that will improve a field with no downside at all.
That’s just a lie and people find out over time.
Do you live in an alternate universe? The last 30 years have been dominated by deregulation and privatization.
Any word that conflates parking minimums with food safety regulation is counter-productive. These two things are so vastly different that they should never be discussed in the same breath.
Maybe in USA, and not everywhere. From what I heard deregulation had not happened in USA healthcare.
And describing last 30 years in EU as dominated by deregulation is clearly wrong.
I think a bigger reason is that people who go to politics or administration often succumb to a certain kind of (reverse) teleological fallacy. They think that because their goal is to advance X, if they propose regulations for that purpose, their regulations will advance X.
You could imagine a system where a permit and planning department finds it's functions taken over by a minimal state agency when not enough housing is built in its area. The state of California is slowly moving that direction because it's so bad.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/feb/15/earthq...
Letting the free market take care of it isn't natural or neutral. It's literally never been how human society does things.
Probably wasn't a list of real laws? So says Wikipedia: "Rather than a code of laws, then, it may be a scholarly treatise."
There's zero equality in it. Killing a commoner is cheaper than killing a noble. If the badly built house falls on a slave, the builder owes the owner a slave. So if the free market is an innovation like equality, and is not natural, well, fair point I guess, and natural isn't necessarily good. But was Babylon natural, anyway, or just old?
The notion that the free market is natural means something. I suppose organic is the real idea there, and that makes it just another appeal for using local knowledge as opposed to insensitive central management.
Just another way regulation fails to do what is supposed to, while its downsides (diminished competition, deterring startups and supporting incumbents) still apply.
This is why blindly relying on regulation and ignoring its trade offs is just foolish.
But they do exist. Their downsides still apply. They will keep intimidating and burdening the honest players and deterring prospective startups while completely failing to stop bad players.
They will even encourage corruption: obey heavy regulations and controls or simply pay a tribute to the ruler.
FTA: “ According to numbers published by the environment and urbanisation ministry in 2018, more than half of the buildings in Turkey – equivalent to almost 13m buildings – violate construction and safety regulations.”