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Comment by pydry | Hacker News Reader

If demand for cars skyrockets then you (eventually) get more cars at the same price coz the manufacturer can just make more.

If everybody wants to buy up land because "god isnt making it any more" you get less land at an even higher price which makes it even more attractive as a store in value.

So no, supply and demand doesnt really work for land the way it works for everything else.

Land needs to be taxed a lot to create enough supply and in California prop 13 quite deliberately did the precise opposite of that.

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Zoning that reduces buildable footprint and/or height artificially increases demand for land. If the only way to build a home is to buy a 9000 sqft lot, then my demand for land is 9000 sqft. If you can build 18 homes on that same lot, my demand for land is 450 sqft.

Land definitely needs to be taxed, but not without the zoning changes first to allow more to be built on less.

Zoning is the hobby horse of property developers. They're endlessly frustrated by the way zoning prevents them from building the most profitable construction - no matter whether there is a good or a bad reason for it (sometimes it's good sometimes it's not).

This inspires a lobbying and public outreach effort to try and convince people that relaxing zoning rules will fix everything.

As with many corporate lobbied for campaigns, it may be a good idea in general (e.g. net neutrality) or it may not be but it's definitely never the panacea it's sold as by the well funded PR campaign.

TFA shows that it was zoning changes that allowed the influx of housing and lower prices. You can find similar articles across the country everywhere that has had significant relaxation of zoning restrictions, like in Minneapolis, Austin, and Seattle (just off the top of my head). This includes places where building code and permitting processes have gotten more arduous while the zoning was relaxed.

I don't care if it is a panacea or not...If you want to convince me that restrictive zoning is not the most significant cause of our housing affordability crisis, you'd have to find some better proof than "developers like upzoning and developers are bad people".

> Seattle

Source for Seattle? I know there was a state law a couple years ago allowing for more housing, but I haven't seen reports of its effects.

"It won't fix everything" doesn't seem like much of an argument against it, though?

It's like the starfish tale - https://www.thestarfishchange.org/starfish-tale

Adding a dwelling unit won't solve the problem for everyone - but it will solve the problem for someone!

(Now there's perhaps an offset argument - if you can afford to build or buy, should you build so as to increase the supply?)

This is empirically not supported. Relaxing zoning rules works extremely well.

Look at Japan, look at any metropolitan U.S. city that has actually leaned into it. Europe has had mixed use zones for effectively centuries and is not the dystopia that NIMBYs proclaim will appear in the absence of zoning.

It is unpopular because we subsidize the lives and assets of people who “have things” through zoning policy that they make.

Up to a point. Yes, it is nice to mix housing and retail and the like, and some zoning laws prevent this. But you have to look back into the 19th century before zoning laws existed and you had things like slaughterhouses opening in residential neighborhoods. Zoning has good reasons to exist.

Residential and commercial can work pretty well together, up to the point of noise and chemical risks. Industrial will pretty much always need to be zoned because of different hazards it presents.

Correction: zoning had good reasons to exist, but it doesn't anymore. Everything that we used to solve that problem is better solved by environmental laws than it ever was by zoning. It turns out that if you make companies pay for their environmental pollution via noise, chemicals, air pollution, etc., they tend to locate their industrial capacity where it is easier to solve or less impactful.

And while every single reasonable but outdated justification for zoning has slowly disappeared, zoning has been thoroughly co-opted by greedy sociopaths and meddlesome wannabe HOA presidents who want to control their neighbors and police aesthetics and keep out undesirables and inflate the value of their investments.

Taxing land works better. Look at Japan where property taxes encourage development.

>If everybody wants to buy up land because "god isnt making it any more" you get less land at an even higher price which makes it even more attractive as a store in value.

Yes but people aren't trying to buy land, they are trying to buy housing, which yes, has a foundation on land but also can increase vertically without significantly increasing the land usage.

It does, because factories don’t have unlimited production capacity. See what happened when Covid hit, or when interest rates go down. Used car prices go up with it too.

Land != Housing.

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