> In some places, anti-densification rules continue to raise property values, and in these places we should expect the Downzoning to be as politically robust as it has been for the last century: it really does give property owners something they want.
I have to wonder to what extent that's actually true. To begin with, if you have a single family home in an area with high demand, upzoning could make someone willing to pay you even more than the house is currently worth because they could still turn a profit when turning it into ten or twenty times as much housing on the same lot. In other words, the value of the house may go down but the value of the land goes up when you can build more housing on it.
On top of that, higher housing prices don't necessarily equate to a better life or even more money. If your house is worth more but you still need a place to live then you can't sell it, unless you are planning to sell it soon in which case upzoning gets you more money because developers start bidding on your house before the new housing the upzoning allows to be built is on the market yet.
If not, it's not just your house that costs more. The other ones do too, which increases cost of living. Local shops have to pay higher rents and pass on that cost to you, or can't find local workers because young people can't afford local rent, so they have to close down. Then you get higher local unemployment and more crime and homelessness. You might even lose your own job because your employer moved out. What do you think drives offshoring? High domestic costs.
And if people are only thinking about the first order effect then they might imagine downzoning is to their advantage when it isn't. Which makes them support it but only until someone shows them the math.
Even if you need your home to live in, you can still borrow against your property value, essentially "eating the bricks".
Alternatively, you can use the value of your house as an emergency fund: If you desperately need money, you can move into something smaller, or more distant from the city, and cash out.
If you do neither of these things, your children will inherit the value of your house. Either way, the money you gain are real money, and you actually gain them.
> Even if you need your home to live in, you can still borrow against your property value, essentially "eating the bricks".
This is not a source of money, it's only a source of collateral. Anything you borrow not only has to be paid back, you have to pay interest. And interest rates are higher than they used to be and the standard deduction is now large enough that most people don't get to deduct the interest anymore.
Moreover, it only means anything if the difference in value would have made a difference. If you want to borrow $20,000 then a house with $100,000 in equity is quite sufficient and another $100,000 in equity isn't doing much for you.
> If you desperately need money, you can move into something smaller, or more distant from the city, and cash out.
Houses are much worse for this than e.g. stocks, because they're hard (and extremely inconvenient when you live in it) to sell in a hurry unless you want to a lose a lot of value. A lot of people also can't do this anymore because they got a fixed-rate mortgage before rates went up and now they can't move or they'll have to refinance at the higher rate which would eat most if not more than all of the difference in value.
> If you do neither of these things, your children will inherit the value of your house.
But then they need a place to live and then either can't sell it because they're living in it or get the money from selling it but pay that much again to acquire a different place to live.
I know this solution has you interacting with the disgusting poors, but if you have multiple bedrooms, you can rent them out and have roommates defray the cost of the mortgage and property tax, possibly for a profit. Crazy idea, I know, but just something to keep in mind, should one find themselves in that situation.
> I have to wonder to what extent that's actually true.
It’s fairly easy to do the exercise in many real estate markets. For example, look at recent sales on your favorite real estate platform and find neighborhoods with very different property sizes but otherwise similar features. An easy one is Atherton vs the areas of Menlo Park directly adjacent to it. Effectively identical commutes, literally the same schools, etc. Menlo Park is quite down-zoned by any reasonable standard, but Atherton is very down-zoned and has huge lots. The houses in Atherton look more expensive, but they’re actually dramatically less valuable per unit property size. If you owned property in Atherton and wanted to increase your property value, the best thing you could do is to magically teleport your property a single block away out of Atherton.
You’re picking literally the worst comparison. Atherton is almost impossible to compare to anything because houses like that are so insanely expensive to maintain and top end market size caps the value.
Literally you have no idea what you’re talking about. I mean it’s hard to imagine someone would have written this in good faith it’s so ridiculous.
This seems to be the conundrum in arguments like these — they baffle us because the comments are either quite obviously disingenuous or so radically stupid you lose hope in humanity.
I tend to agree. There might be a big window for someone motivated to get a course "how to maximise the value of your house purchase" into schools to cover all that. If people are going to be greedy and selfish at least they shouldn't be stupid about it, land and housing policy is one of the more consequential things society deals with.
It can go both ways. If a developer wants your house for the land you want big. But if you stay as a house and your neighbour becomes the high rise and you cant then you lose out.
I feel it’s a bit disingenuous to discuss that a developer might pay more for a lot with a house on it, to build more houses, but you don’t really touch on, at all, how much the resulting housing might cost. Surely 20 units on a single lot will be cheaper than the single family house.
Now you have potentially 20 families, or at least 20 individuals, paying taxes, participating in the local economy, etc instead of just one single family. Lots of economic benefits to consider here but saying “downzoning good, actually” because a developer might pay more? Idk. seems pretty poorly thought out.
> Surely 20 units on a single lot will be cheaper than the single family house.
Those units will cost less -- largely because at scale they're resulting in more housing supply -- but the detached houses will decline in value in terms of housing but increase in value in terms of land because you can now build more on the lot.
> saying “downzoning good, actually” because a developer might pay more?
The argument is the opposite. Downzoning is bad -- even for existing homeowners -- because a developer would otherwise pay them more for their land than they'd be losing in the value of their house.
I wonder about this. There's all this noise about a great housing shortage in San Francisco, but the population of SF is up only 65,000 people in 10 years. There are a lot more tall buildings. This may be a monopoly overpricing situation rather than an actual shortage. There's a huge amount of empty office space.
Remember, the world passed "peak baby" back in 2013. Population is leveling off in the developed world.
Population growth is reduced by a housing shortage because people who otherwise want to move in can't if there aren't units available for them to move in to.
Moreover, who is supposed to have a monopoly on housing in San Francisco? Is there any single entity that owns even as much as 1% of all the housing in the city? And even if there was, wouldn't building more housing still fix it, because the more you build the more you dilute their monopoly?
I noticed there is a split how this topic is discussed in (center-)left and (center-)right circles.
The right generally takes as a given that the cause of the problem (if there is a problem at all) is that there is not enough housing and we just have to build more.
The left argues that in we in fact do have enough units that could be used for housing (or at least the situation is not as clear-cut), but that other factors prevent them to be available at affordable prices, like the effects of extreme income and wealth inequality on the market.
Personally, I think the "left-wing" explanation makes more sense - at least I've never understood where that sudden shortage of physical housing is supposed to have come from. We neither had a population explosion, nor a war or catastrophe that would have destroyed a lot of houses. So then why would there have been "enough" housing in the past but not anymore today?
About 14 thousand people move to Prague yearly (netto), but construction hasn't kept pace by any means; Czech building permits are a bureaucratic hell on Earth - hello fighting a 10 year paper war over a banal block of flats!
By pure mathematics, there must be a shortage, and there indeed is.
There isn't any shortage in Ostrava where I am from, because the city lost 40 thousand people since the 1990s. But there is a shortage of well-paid jobs.
Because people want to live in cities again. Lot of people do not want to live in suburbs / exurbs. they want walkability. bikability. community. car-lite living. It’s high in demand, short on supply.
> Personally, I think the "left-wing" explanation makes more sense - at least I've never understood where that sudden shortage of physical housing is supposed to have come from.
It comes from construction dropping far below what was necessary to keep up with historical utilization in proportion to population after the Great Recession and, while it has recovered above the amount needed to keep up, it hasn't been far enough ahead for long enough to cover the accumulated post-GR deficit.
(And the national story undersrates the problem going on in lots of in-demand cities, which weren't keeping up with local need before the broader collapse of the GR.)
There might not be a housing shortage on the North American continent, but that doesn't help because people want to live in New York, not upper Saskatchewan
I hesitate because there's not a lot of data out there. Are those being measured the same way? Are they even real measurements and not just repeated talking points...?
You have to look at the average household size and number of children, not just population.
A world where most households are man + woman + 0..3 children is very different than one where most households are 1..2 people + cat/dog. The latter demands far more housing than the former, even when populations are otherwise equal.
A population of 10 million singles demand 4 times more "housing units" than a population of 10 million people in 4-person families.
This is what makes immigration-driven population growth so pernicious compared to childbirth-driven. The family structures you end up with are completely different.
> A population of 10 million singles demand 4 times more "housing units" than a population of 10 million people in 4-person families.
Those housing units are not interchangeable. Families often want extra bedrooms, and units with extra bedrooms are frequently sorely lacking.
This is one thing that is very strikingly different in different markets. A lot of US metros have a fair amount of new housing but almost none with even two bedrooms per unit, let alone three. In a place like Taiwan, there are similarly absurd housing prices, but the new dense developments have four- and five-bedroom units.
I don’t have any data or links to contribute, but my gut feeling is that this effect would be dwarfed by population movement, specifically urbanisation - if rural areas are emptying out as everyone moves to the city, you can get the same patterns (e.g. reduced housing supply in cities and all the flow on effects from that) without any change in total population.
Where I live in France there was a big relaxation in building permits in the 50s to 70s, and we are dealing with these projects badly designed (because of the lack of oversight) today. Neighborhoods that are urban hell, disfigured city centers with giant hotels 5 times higher than other buildings, etc.
With better planning the same capacity could have been added but with way better quality of life.
What you need is to require new construction to have a certain density along with building standards (sunlight, insulation, etc.).
Just deregulating exposes the land to the whim of the developer’s good will — trusting them not to get the most bang for the buck out of building a slum, which is a fickle guarantee.
If there’s no short term profitability, public sector needs to step in. Housing is infrastructure, it’s crucial to the land’s growth.
We should distinguish between technical standards and zoning.
You can enforce technical standards so that no "slum-like" building gets built, and already in the planing phase. Zoning is more about precluding certain type of buildings, or maybe any new buildings, altogether.
If every developer was able to build as much housing as they ever wanted, the quality would go up through competition.
In pretty much every other sector of the economy, the government regulates safety, and quality comes via competition. Housing should be no different.
But because we've artificially throttled the amount of housing that can be built, the best way to improve profits is to push down the quality as the buyers don't really have an alternative
The one thing that makes assumptions about free market forces miss the mark is the fact that ideal markets don’t exist in the real world.
I case of housing, in the US, we’re as far from free market as possible. So making assumptions about what will happen if we build more based on a naive supply and demand model isn’t going to work.
A paradigm shift is to think in terms of power distribution and policy incentives. Why would a homeowner support zoning reforms? Even if they become a minority, will they be able to get the others to not vote or vote against their own interests?
The housing market in the US is extremely competitive. Major cities have hundreds of thousands if not millions of competing landlords and a similar number of owner-occupied units.
The supply constraint isn't that Comcast and AT&T each own half of the land and you can only get it from one of them, it's that the government effectively prohibits building more, so all the competing construction companies who want to increase supply because that's what makes them money are unable to do it because it's prohibited by law.
> Why would a homeowner support zoning reforms?
Because zoning reforms that allow higher density may lower the value of the house but increase the value of the land, and homeowners of single-family homes have a high ratio of land to house. And because they lower cost of living and lower crime and they like paying less for things and not getting robbed.
Or because they have a small house but need a bigger house, and then higher prices hurt them. Or because they have a bigger house and need a smaller house, in which case they're about to sell it and it's better for them to add a bunch of developers to the bidding who want to build more on the lot and then cash out before the new developments come onto the market. Or because they live in city B and want to move to city A where housing is more expensive, and then they would support state or national-level policies to reduce housing scarcity for the same reason as the person who needs a bigger house.
They are competing, but not for the customer but for the land, which appreciates. Remember, there are different forms of competition.
The "supply constraint" is that the landowners don’t want to change zoning laws, and that space around big cities is limited. The government doesn’t act of it’s own initiative, it represents people.
If your logic held, it should be the homeowners pushing for density. Real world disagrees with your assessment, but you seem to be doubling down on it.
It’s a magical policy under that makes better off both the owner of a small house who needs a bigger house and the owner of a large house who needs a smaller house.
If the owner of the large house would be better off by the presence of bids by developers, wouldn’t that tend (strongly) to work against the interests of the owner of the small house seeking a larger house?
It might work to help the owner of a small house who wants to move into a larger apartment or condominium.
> Because zoning reforms that allow higher density may lower the value of the house
For most detached single family homes in in-demand areas where housing (and thus sustainable population) are constrained by the supply of housing units, they probably won't do that, either; not only will they increase the land value, the fact that they increases population while decreasing the supply of ainglet-family homes will drive up the price of existing single family homes.
What it does, though, is reduce the use value (experienced utility of use) for current owner-residents for whom the particular local character is a factor in enjoyment, and make alternative replacements with the quality that is now missing from the current home that are in the same area (and thus compatible with existing jobs, etc.) harder to find, as well.
Well, you either get nice but prohibitively expensive places that also look and function like segregation tools increasing and perpetuating inequality, or you get slums that get progressively worsened simply as the time passes. Is there even a middle ground?
Indeed. In fact, unaffordability is the whole point. Main problem with the affordable housing is that it attracts the people who seek affordable housing.
I think people voted with their feet to expand geographically into the suburbs where city cores experienced the bimodal outcomes.
If the only place people would genuinely and completely freely choose to live inside a city is a place they can’t afford, but 3-30 miles away is a beautiful neighborhood of detached houses that they can afford, you don’t have to think very long to predict that there will be intense interests in these suburbs by people seeking to escape the city.
Sounds like a great test case for public intervention to shake up a bad market equilibrium: acquire large areas of land and build new cities and neighborhoods unencumbered by land use and zoning bylaws.
The places where cities make sense are generally the places where they already are. You could hypothetically build the trappings of a new city in North Dakota or West Texas, but who is going to move to a place which is just a bunch of empty buildings surrounded by farmland? You can already buy a house in such places for less than it costs for one in a major city but there is a reason that people don't.
Whereas if you would just rezone the areas with high demand to allow new construction to actually happen there then you don't need the government to raise and spend a ton of money, all you need them to do is to stop prohibiting the thing people would otherwise be doing.
I wonder, could you manufacture that? It seems to be happening in e.g. the middle east where they conjure up a city in the middle of the desert and just... create demand for a city there.
Take SF, which has a lot of tech jobs that aren't tied to any geographical location. Build a new city, offices, a university, loads of housing and make that the tech / internet capital of the world.
All the 'large areas of land' that people want to live in already have dense cities. This sort of ideas have been tried again and again, and it falls apart because people just don't want to move there.
Would you be enthusiastic about relocating if this was forty minutes away from Vegas in the desert?
> All the 'large areas of land' that people want to live in already have dense cities.
If by people you mean 18th century farmers or 19th century merchants, sure. I guess you could make some semblance of an argument for countries like Belgium or Japan, but it's downright ridiculous to claim United States, one of the most sparsely populated developed nations, already has all the large cities it can support.
Increasing population merely to EU average would create housing for hundreds of millions.
That watercolor promoting "cite jardin de Gennevilliers" has a stormy and threatening sky. Lead white is probably the culprit (reacts with sulfur over time).
> nearly every city in the Western world banned densification.
I mean thats not true, as you well know. London put a massive belt around it to stop it from growing, which means its artificially dense. Its population density is 4/5x of amsterdam.
The US has a predilection for urban sprawl, but elsewhere thats not the case so much in Europe because land is expensive.
"Residents of the London neighborhood South Tottenham recently persuaded their local councils to let them double the height of their houses", says the article, so evidently there was a restriction on height there. Elsewhere in London there are tower blocks, of course.
look at it in 3D. It has a mix of late victorian terraces (mostly posh ones) and then a large amount of 1960s-70s medium density blocks/maisonettes. That shit is already dense. Adding new floors doesn't actually make it more dense(unless people buy and split it into flats.)
currently, you can easily add 6m extension out the back and up by one floor without too much hassle (so called permitted development). This means that you can easily double the floor space of a house, with little issue from the planning(zoning) people. The innovation that's pointed out is that they can add two floors up. Which is unusual, because its fucking expensive.
We also don't have HoA bullshit, so adding extensions doesn't require brownosing the local busybody community. just pay £750 and wait a few weeks.
I am not sure that London is the example needed for the topic, in part due to what happened in 1666, which was when the 'great fire' decimated the city, leading to some reforms such as requiring buildings to be built from anything but wood and for them to have parapets to prevent a burning roof setting fire to an adjacent building. Coupled with this was a height restriction, for the Fire Brigade, not to 'preserve views of St Pauls'.
In America, if the city burns to the ground, they just get on with it, they aren't 'institutionally traumatised' for centuries, but the Great Fire cast a long shadow over history and building codes, which restricted the density of the housing.
Also important but not discussed in the article, is the matter of building materials. When Sir Christopher Wren was redesigning London after the fire, he could not specify glass and steel since that wasn't around back then (well, glass existed but the Pilkington process to make flat glass hadn't been devised yet).
Most British towns can be dated by their building materials, starting with the original buildings built from stone from the local quarry. The type of stone found locally determines what these buildings are like, so you might have limestone, as in Cotswold stone, with a creamy colour, or, you might have nice red stone, for example, in the Welsh Borderlands.
Next came the canals, and with it things like Welsh slate and iron. Then the trains came along, bringing bricks and steel with it. Then there are modern times when you can have marble from Italy and whatever else flaunts wealth (or is cheapest).
Putting it all together, familiarity with the materials and where they are from enables the relative age of parts of a British town to be identified.
Needless to say, all roads lead to somewhere, in the UK it is London, where so much has changed that it is not so easy to see the 'onion layers' of materials used in the city as it has grown, mostly because London is more like hundreds of villages that merged together as they all grew. Plus, London is always under constant redevelopment.
The green belt is a relatively recent development, dating back only a century ago, when the smog situation in London meant that kids had rickets due to lack of sun. Pea-soupers made it necessary for there to be some escape to the countryside. Interestingly, trams were what you needed to get around in that era because smog was like the worst fog imaginable, making it impossible to get from A to B on a vehicle that was not on rails.
Also not in the article is how the railways had a sideline in building towns for their railways to serve. The low density suburbs were once far from London, therefore requiring the train, and the dream was to escape the city with the smog for these new 'garden cities'. Had they built vast sky scrapers in (say) Hemel Hempstead, instead of actual houses then you would not have the same appeal.
If you are in the UK and interested in seeing development patterns, one gem is the Lever estate on the Wirral, built to serve Liverpool's industry on the Mersey River, which was where the Lever Brothers operated. They were Quaker types and, on their worker estates, they built wonderful parks, libraries and art galleries. The Lever estate has this amazing art gallery in the middle of it, with artwork far better than anything you would expect to find anywhere outside the big European capitals.
The whole thing with the Quakers was a 'war on slavery' that was won in 1807 and 1833-1838, with the idea being that machines would replace slaves. They wanted their workers to be anything but slaves. Despite being few in number, they had many sectors of industry sewn up, notably confectionary and soap. Places such as the Lever Estate 'set the standard' for those wanting more than slums.
Finally, we did have the high rises of the 1960s. They didn't work out as they lacked community, leading to crime and a general downward spiral. Glasgow, once the second city of the empire, was notable for these, however, most of them had to come down, for lower density housing estates to be built elsewhere, further up or down the Clyde.
I am not sure the article makes sense in the British context, it reads more like examples picked to suit a hypothesis. I also would have liked it if the author had explained why inflation came in to play from 1914. Note that after WW1, the UK lost all of its skilled tradesmen because someone decided that they were needed for cannon fodder. This was a tragedy, not just for them and their families, but also for the quality of housing and what was possible after WW1.
Mortgages also need to be in the picture, in feudal times there was no market in property, however, the mortgage came into being and that changed how development happened in a big way. This too affected how dense housing would be.
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I have to wonder to what extent that's actually true. To begin with, if you have a single family home in an area with high demand, upzoning could make someone willing to pay you even more than the house is currently worth because they could still turn a profit when turning it into ten or twenty times as much housing on the same lot. In other words, the value of the house may go down but the value of the land goes up when you can build more housing on it.
On top of that, higher housing prices don't necessarily equate to a better life or even more money. If your house is worth more but you still need a place to live then you can't sell it, unless you are planning to sell it soon in which case upzoning gets you more money because developers start bidding on your house before the new housing the upzoning allows to be built is on the market yet.
If not, it's not just your house that costs more. The other ones do too, which increases cost of living. Local shops have to pay higher rents and pass on that cost to you, or can't find local workers because young people can't afford local rent, so they have to close down. Then you get higher local unemployment and more crime and homelessness. You might even lose your own job because your employer moved out. What do you think drives offshoring? High domestic costs.
And if people are only thinking about the first order effect then they might imagine downzoning is to their advantage when it isn't. Which makes them support it but only until someone shows them the math.
Alternatively, you can use the value of your house as an emergency fund: If you desperately need money, you can move into something smaller, or more distant from the city, and cash out.
If you do neither of these things, your children will inherit the value of your house. Either way, the money you gain are real money, and you actually gain them.
This is not a source of money, it's only a source of collateral. Anything you borrow not only has to be paid back, you have to pay interest. And interest rates are higher than they used to be and the standard deduction is now large enough that most people don't get to deduct the interest anymore.
Moreover, it only means anything if the difference in value would have made a difference. If you want to borrow $20,000 then a house with $100,000 in equity is quite sufficient and another $100,000 in equity isn't doing much for you.
> If you desperately need money, you can move into something smaller, or more distant from the city, and cash out.
Houses are much worse for this than e.g. stocks, because they're hard (and extremely inconvenient when you live in it) to sell in a hurry unless you want to a lose a lot of value. A lot of people also can't do this anymore because they got a fixed-rate mortgage before rates went up and now they can't move or they'll have to refinance at the higher rate which would eat most if not more than all of the difference in value.
> If you do neither of these things, your children will inherit the value of your house.
But then they need a place to live and then either can't sell it because they're living in it or get the money from selling it but pay that much again to acquire a different place to live.
Deleted Comment
It’s fairly easy to do the exercise in many real estate markets. For example, look at recent sales on your favorite real estate platform and find neighborhoods with very different property sizes but otherwise similar features. An easy one is Atherton vs the areas of Menlo Park directly adjacent to it. Effectively identical commutes, literally the same schools, etc. Menlo Park is quite down-zoned by any reasonable standard, but Atherton is very down-zoned and has huge lots. The houses in Atherton look more expensive, but they’re actually dramatically less valuable per unit property size. If you owned property in Atherton and wanted to increase your property value, the best thing you could do is to magically teleport your property a single block away out of Atherton.
Literally you have no idea what you’re talking about. I mean it’s hard to imagine someone would have written this in good faith it’s so ridiculous.
This seems to be the conundrum in arguments like these — they baffle us because the comments are either quite obviously disingenuous or so radically stupid you lose hope in humanity.
Now you have potentially 20 families, or at least 20 individuals, paying taxes, participating in the local economy, etc instead of just one single family. Lots of economic benefits to consider here but saying “downzoning good, actually” because a developer might pay more? Idk. seems pretty poorly thought out.
Those units will cost less -- largely because at scale they're resulting in more housing supply -- but the detached houses will decline in value in terms of housing but increase in value in terms of land because you can now build more on the lot.
> saying “downzoning good, actually” because a developer might pay more?
The argument is the opposite. Downzoning is bad -- even for existing homeowners -- because a developer would otherwise pay them more for their land than they'd be losing in the value of their house.
Remember, the world passed "peak baby" back in 2013. Population is leveling off in the developed world.
Moreover, who is supposed to have a monopoly on housing in San Francisco? Is there any single entity that owns even as much as 1% of all the housing in the city? And even if there was, wouldn't building more housing still fix it, because the more you build the more you dilute their monopoly?
Yes. 12 big landlords own a majority of SF bay area property.[1] The San Francisco Chronicle has an online map, but it's behind their paywall.
[1] https://www.fastcompany.com/90792419/12-mega-landlords-own-m...
An actual shortage is characterized by prices being prevented from rising. It is already understood that "shortage" is being used colloquially here.
The right generally takes as a given that the cause of the problem (if there is a problem at all) is that there is not enough housing and we just have to build more.
The left argues that in we in fact do have enough units that could be used for housing (or at least the situation is not as clear-cut), but that other factors prevent them to be available at affordable prices, like the effects of extreme income and wealth inequality on the market.
Personally, I think the "left-wing" explanation makes more sense - at least I've never understood where that sudden shortage of physical housing is supposed to have come from. We neither had a population explosion, nor a war or catastrophe that would have destroyed a lot of houses. So then why would there have been "enough" housing in the past but not anymore today?
By pure mathematics, there must be a shortage, and there indeed is.
There isn't any shortage in Ostrava where I am from, because the city lost 40 thousand people since the 1990s. But there is a shortage of well-paid jobs.
It comes from construction dropping far below what was necessary to keep up with historical utilization in proportion to population after the Great Recession and, while it has recovered above the amount needed to keep up, it hasn't been far enough ahead for long enough to cover the accumulated post-GR deficit.
While this is a couple years old, it illustrates the issue: https://www.axios.com/2023/12/16/housing-market-why-homes-ex...
(And the national story undersrates the problem going on in lots of in-demand cities, which weren't keeping up with local need before the broader collapse of the GR.)
London by comparison is about 2.5%
Why is SFs figure so high. Why are people holding on to unproductive assets, paying to maintain them.
Dead Comment
A world where most households are man + woman + 0..3 children is very different than one where most households are 1..2 people + cat/dog. The latter demands far more housing than the former, even when populations are otherwise equal.
A population of 10 million singles demand 4 times more "housing units" than a population of 10 million people in 4-person families.
This is what makes immigration-driven population growth so pernicious compared to childbirth-driven. The family structures you end up with are completely different.
Those housing units are not interchangeable. Families often want extra bedrooms, and units with extra bedrooms are frequently sorely lacking.
This is one thing that is very strikingly different in different markets. A lot of US metros have a fair amount of new housing but almost none with even two bedrooms per unit, let alone three. In a place like Taiwan, there are similarly absurd housing prices, but the new dense developments have four- and five-bedroom units.
With better planning the same capacity could have been added but with way better quality of life.
Just deregulating exposes the land to the whim of the developer’s good will — trusting them not to get the most bang for the buck out of building a slum, which is a fickle guarantee.
If there’s no short term profitability, public sector needs to step in. Housing is infrastructure, it’s crucial to the land’s growth.
You can enforce technical standards so that no "slum-like" building gets built, and already in the planing phase. Zoning is more about precluding certain type of buildings, or maybe any new buildings, altogether.
In pretty much every other sector of the economy, the government regulates safety, and quality comes via competition. Housing should be no different.
But because we've artificially throttled the amount of housing that can be built, the best way to improve profits is to push down the quality as the buyers don't really have an alternative
you have quite a breezy perception of hell. does something like this actually bother anyone with a brain who chose to live in a city?
That’s not at all likely.
I case of housing, in the US, we’re as far from free market as possible. So making assumptions about what will happen if we build more based on a naive supply and demand model isn’t going to work.
A paradigm shift is to think in terms of power distribution and policy incentives. Why would a homeowner support zoning reforms? Even if they become a minority, will they be able to get the others to not vote or vote against their own interests?
The system caps its own growth.
The supply constraint isn't that Comcast and AT&T each own half of the land and you can only get it from one of them, it's that the government effectively prohibits building more, so all the competing construction companies who want to increase supply because that's what makes them money are unable to do it because it's prohibited by law.
> Why would a homeowner support zoning reforms?
Because zoning reforms that allow higher density may lower the value of the house but increase the value of the land, and homeowners of single-family homes have a high ratio of land to house. And because they lower cost of living and lower crime and they like paying less for things and not getting robbed.
Or because they have a small house but need a bigger house, and then higher prices hurt them. Or because they have a bigger house and need a smaller house, in which case they're about to sell it and it's better for them to add a bunch of developers to the bidding who want to build more on the lot and then cash out before the new developments come onto the market. Or because they live in city B and want to move to city A where housing is more expensive, and then they would support state or national-level policies to reduce housing scarcity for the same reason as the person who needs a bigger house.
The "supply constraint" is that the landowners don’t want to change zoning laws, and that space around big cities is limited. The government doesn’t act of it’s own initiative, it represents people.
If your logic held, it should be the homeowners pushing for density. Real world disagrees with your assessment, but you seem to be doubling down on it.
Why not update your model?
If the owner of the large house would be better off by the presence of bids by developers, wouldn’t that tend (strongly) to work against the interests of the owner of the small house seeking a larger house?
It might work to help the owner of a small house who wants to move into a larger apartment or condominium.
For most detached single family homes in in-demand areas where housing (and thus sustainable population) are constrained by the supply of housing units, they probably won't do that, either; not only will they increase the land value, the fact that they increases population while decreasing the supply of ainglet-family homes will drive up the price of existing single family homes.
What it does, though, is reduce the use value (experienced utility of use) for current owner-residents for whom the particular local character is a factor in enjoyment, and make alternative replacements with the quality that is now missing from the current home that are in the same area (and thus compatible with existing jobs, etc.) harder to find, as well.
If the only place people would genuinely and completely freely choose to live inside a city is a place they can’t afford, but 3-30 miles away is a beautiful neighborhood of detached houses that they can afford, you don’t have to think very long to predict that there will be intense interests in these suburbs by people seeking to escape the city.
Whereas if you would just rezone the areas with high demand to allow new construction to actually happen there then you don't need the government to raise and spend a ton of money, all you need them to do is to stop prohibiting the thing people would otherwise be doing.
Take SF, which has a lot of tech jobs that aren't tied to any geographical location. Build a new city, offices, a university, loads of housing and make that the tech / internet capital of the world.
Would you be enthusiastic about relocating if this was forty minutes away from Vegas in the desert?
If by people you mean 18th century farmers or 19th century merchants, sure. I guess you could make some semblance of an argument for countries like Belgium or Japan, but it's downright ridiculous to claim United States, one of the most sparsely populated developed nations, already has all the large cities it can support.
Increasing population merely to EU average would create housing for hundreds of millions.
I mean thats not true, as you well know. London put a massive belt around it to stop it from growing, which means its artificially dense. Its population density is 4/5x of amsterdam.
The US has a predilection for urban sprawl, but elsewhere thats not the case so much in Europe because land is expensive.
look at it in 3D. It has a mix of late victorian terraces (mostly posh ones) and then a large amount of 1960s-70s medium density blocks/maisonettes. That shit is already dense. Adding new floors doesn't actually make it more dense(unless people buy and split it into flats.)
currently, you can easily add 6m extension out the back and up by one floor without too much hassle (so called permitted development). This means that you can easily double the floor space of a house, with little issue from the planning(zoning) people. The innovation that's pointed out is that they can add two floors up. Which is unusual, because its fucking expensive.
We also don't have HoA bullshit, so adding extensions doesn't require brownosing the local busybody community. just pay £750 and wait a few weeks.
In America, if the city burns to the ground, they just get on with it, they aren't 'institutionally traumatised' for centuries, but the Great Fire cast a long shadow over history and building codes, which restricted the density of the housing.
Also important but not discussed in the article, is the matter of building materials. When Sir Christopher Wren was redesigning London after the fire, he could not specify glass and steel since that wasn't around back then (well, glass existed but the Pilkington process to make flat glass hadn't been devised yet).
Most British towns can be dated by their building materials, starting with the original buildings built from stone from the local quarry. The type of stone found locally determines what these buildings are like, so you might have limestone, as in Cotswold stone, with a creamy colour, or, you might have nice red stone, for example, in the Welsh Borderlands.
Next came the canals, and with it things like Welsh slate and iron. Then the trains came along, bringing bricks and steel with it. Then there are modern times when you can have marble from Italy and whatever else flaunts wealth (or is cheapest).
Putting it all together, familiarity with the materials and where they are from enables the relative age of parts of a British town to be identified.
Needless to say, all roads lead to somewhere, in the UK it is London, where so much has changed that it is not so easy to see the 'onion layers' of materials used in the city as it has grown, mostly because London is more like hundreds of villages that merged together as they all grew. Plus, London is always under constant redevelopment.
The green belt is a relatively recent development, dating back only a century ago, when the smog situation in London meant that kids had rickets due to lack of sun. Pea-soupers made it necessary for there to be some escape to the countryside. Interestingly, trams were what you needed to get around in that era because smog was like the worst fog imaginable, making it impossible to get from A to B on a vehicle that was not on rails.
Also not in the article is how the railways had a sideline in building towns for their railways to serve. The low density suburbs were once far from London, therefore requiring the train, and the dream was to escape the city with the smog for these new 'garden cities'. Had they built vast sky scrapers in (say) Hemel Hempstead, instead of actual houses then you would not have the same appeal.
If you are in the UK and interested in seeing development patterns, one gem is the Lever estate on the Wirral, built to serve Liverpool's industry on the Mersey River, which was where the Lever Brothers operated. They were Quaker types and, on their worker estates, they built wonderful parks, libraries and art galleries. The Lever estate has this amazing art gallery in the middle of it, with artwork far better than anything you would expect to find anywhere outside the big European capitals.
The whole thing with the Quakers was a 'war on slavery' that was won in 1807 and 1833-1838, with the idea being that machines would replace slaves. They wanted their workers to be anything but slaves. Despite being few in number, they had many sectors of industry sewn up, notably confectionary and soap. Places such as the Lever Estate 'set the standard' for those wanting more than slums.
Finally, we did have the high rises of the 1960s. They didn't work out as they lacked community, leading to crime and a general downward spiral. Glasgow, once the second city of the empire, was notable for these, however, most of them had to come down, for lower density housing estates to be built elsewhere, further up or down the Clyde.
I am not sure the article makes sense in the British context, it reads more like examples picked to suit a hypothesis. I also would have liked it if the author had explained why inflation came in to play from 1914. Note that after WW1, the UK lost all of its skilled tradesmen because someone decided that they were needed for cannon fodder. This was a tragedy, not just for them and their families, but also for the quality of housing and what was possible after WW1.
Mortgages also need to be in the picture, in feudal times there was no market in property, however, the mortgage came into being and that changed how development happened in a big way. This too affected how dense housing would be.