Zoning. You link the "zones which employ people" and "zones which house people" to balance so you don't have significantly more jobs than homes.
Next you zone for type of housing, where you only allow a certain percentage of the most profitable 1BR apartments to be built, and require those to be above certain size thresholds so that a variety of life situations can actually live in your city.
You don't need to "incentivize" construction, the people that do that already make enormous amounts of money.
From what I’ve seen in and outside America, my gut feeling (I don’t claim expertise) is that zoning can make things worse.
The apartment directly under mine is used as an office. Down and to one side is a psychiatrist. Ground floor is a cafe and a pizza takeaway. The apartment opposite me has a grocery store on the ground floor, an office on the second, a dentist on the third, and it looks like the rest of the units are residential. I may be missing something important about the rules here because I can’t read German well enough, but it feels self-balancing.
America… well, this is a tourist perspective, but I didn’t realise how realistic SimCity was before I visited.
Zoning only became the downfall of American public transit because constituents are selfish; when 80%+ of a county's residents are homeowners, they're incentivized to fight back against anything that would cause their home values to drop (including public transit due to the noise and apartments which would reduce demand for single family homes), and the local politicians are incentivized to listen lest they be ousted in the next election for working against the community's interests.
> incentivized to fight back against anything that would cause their home values to drop
That they perceive will cause their home values to drop. In reality, they use "home value" as a proxy for "my happiness" and tend to block things they don't like, without really considering the impact on prices.
In very large cities, your SFH is worth a shitload more if someone can put an multi-tenant unit down on it. We still see the odd SFH or diner in NYC, which is now worth bajillions of dollars because the city was allowed to grow to be so dense.
Increasing density is pro home values. Anyone fighting against it is absolutely leaving money on the table. They just don't realize it.
Mixed light-commercial and residential is all over the place in US cities. Those places work best when they are supported by transit and fully walkable resources, which often limits their adoption in the US to areas that are highly dense or have newer commuter rail development. Zoning can keep big lot single homes and giant warehouse areas from disrupting those spaces.
Spot on. What zoning proponents miss is that people living and people working and people doing sports etc. are the same people. Zoning is equivalent of a spherical cow in a vacuum and would work only if there are people that work 24/7, then those that live 24/7 etc.
> only allow a certain percentage of the most profitable 1BR apartments to be built
Ah yes, the "ban return on investment and ban certain construction" method of promoting construction. Works 100% of the time, every time. See: SF, Seattle, etc.
If you want to go the Japanese liberal zoning route, simply redefine a one bedroom apartment as a 2.5 tatami sized micro dwelling without central heating and maybe a shared bathroom (or maybe no shower in building at all). Western standards on viable housing are a bit more generous than other countries.
I think that’s intentionally to keep out the poors. Nobody wants those kinds of building in their neighborhood because they house folks of lower social economic class and “bring down the neighborhood”
This happened in East Nashville. It used to be the shady side of town. Then a bunch of artists went over there because that's all they could afford. Then the sycophants followed, property prices are now stupid expensive, and no one with low income can really afford to live there any more.
Ok, in California for example, before this works, you need to undo most of the anti-building laws (these are mostly environmental related btw - not sure if you would be happy with removing them), corrupt permitting boards, and also do some reform on the lawsuit system (since everyone sues you when you start building). Also there are tons of accessibility related laws that make building more expensive - e.g. you must have an elevator on any complex with 3+ apartments. It's probably illegal to build cheap apartments with no AC like we used to.
If you dont change any of this, a new "affordable 1br apartment will probably cost 700K.
> If you dont change any of this, a new "affordable 1br apartment will probably cost 700K.
There are places in California where you can get a single family home, let alone a 1br apartment, for around $200k. Let’s not kid ourselves and substitute California for when we really mean LA or the Bay Area (places where people want to live, as opposed to susanville, where most people don’t want to live).
That sounds all well and good but I live in a desirable central coast city and thanks to SB9 I can now build 4 extra res units on my property. You are mistaken if you think anyone is going to spend that effort and charge anything less than current market ... maybe more, new houses are expensive.
What we need is subsidized housing close to mass transit, single payer medicine, progressive tax reform and subsidized child care. Changing laws to allow the wealthy land owners to build more for-profit residences will help only land owners.
They don't have to charge less than market. They charge market rates and absorb 4 families that would've otherwise taken their market-rate salaries and kicked 4 immigrant families out of a 4-plex that used to rent far below market.
Section 8 are the only units that arent going to go up. Further, in my area 4 households moving to a property is not going to free up 4 local, otherwise cheap, units. New units in my area are going to attract higher-pay-than-average workers from San Jose or somewhere else in the bay area. I think one delusion is that many people think there is a single fix all. Its gonna be more than just build more housing. There are already millions of empty houses in the US.
the trick is that landlords and property owners are not some closely linked cartel but are viciously competitive, so if everyone spends enough effort it can eventually cause a stabilization or even drop in prices.
We do not need subsidized housing further driving up prices.
We need fewer people in the market and that means less availability of large loans and taxes on commercial real estate loans. You can't have so many people competing to buy real estate to rent to you and pushing out people who want to buy.
And people need to be comfortable when a region doesn't want to grow, force them to curtail their commercial zoning, and people just need to leave and go somewhere else. There's plenty of space elsewhere.
When there are no real infrastructural/environmental limitations for population growth in sight, “our region doesn’t want to grow” paints a picture of some residents placing their own emotional attachment to how things used to be above all else.
> When there are no real infrastructural/environmental limitations for population growth in sight, “our region doesn’t want to grow” paints a picture of some residents placing their own emotional attachment to how things used to be above all else.
What exactly is the problem with that? The only thing that welcomes growth forever is cancer, and economists.
We are not discussing restricting human reproduction. Keeping low density strictly ensures humans spread wider and live with larger environmental footprint to appease those averse to change in a futile attempt to hold on to the past.
To make your proposal more reality-compatible, “people should be comfortable when a region has to grow”. This means people’s attitudes as well as infrastructure’s capability to handle increased number of people.
The problem with this sort of balancing act is that most zoning isn't centrally planned enough that you can actually balance this. Most of the time you are planning one small section of a larger urban/suburban complex, not the entire country. So you have to consider inflows and outflows of both commercial and residential demand.
If more people want to live in your city than you currently have housing for, then it's not simply a matter of "balancing zones" anymore. Your plans no longer match reality, and one of four things can happen:
- Your zoning remains static and housing prices rise according to demand, pricing people out of the market
- You hope businesses leave so that you can convert some of the commercial space to residential
- You decide to allocate existing zones on some criteria other than willing price paid
- You zone for higher density and allow existing homeowners to make money by making room
The first option is gentrification. The do-nothing option. The one that we're trying to avoid because we find it distasteful. If we don't fit more people in the city then it becomes a playground for bored rich people as the market will kick everyone else out.
The second option usually doesn't happen - residential demand drives commercial demand because most businesses want to be close to people. If businesses are leaving, that usually means that people are leaving, too. This also means that balancing zones isn't really a thing you need to actually do. The problem isn't that the space is being used inefficiently; the problem is that there isn't enough space to go around.
The third option is rationing. This takes many forms, and is politically popular with basically everyone. But it doesn't actually solve the problem: there are still more people who want to live in your city than houses to put them in. You're just choosing a different way to allocate those houses, and invariably it tends to be a metric that's easier to corrupt, because suppliers now have an incentive to charge rich people more to bypass the system.
The fourth option will actually fix the problem; and in fact is the only way to fix the problem. But it's also the easiest to politically oppose, because we've set the standard here in America that land is supposed to be divided entirely between large shopping centers and low-density suburbs; and that living in anything else is a symbol of urban poverty. This actually isn't true anymore - the areas worst hit by gentrification are also the ones zoned for high density or mixed use, and this is precisely because of people making it difficult to upzone property.
If we didn't have zoning, or at least had less of it[0], then the market could actually work to incentivize resupply rather than just redevelopment. Then we could talk about social housing or housing subsidies on the demand end, knowing that we have a market that actually responds to supply rather than just pocketing the wealth.
[0] e.g. Tie the planners' hands a bit and just have mixed commercial/residential zones of varying densities, with industrial land use separated out for safety/noise reasons. Japan does this.
The reason no one is building expensive apartments in these areas with socialist like governments is because of things like rent control and laws that disadvantage landlords, and which make the prospect of leasing to poor people completely undesirable. This is why a huge number of the apartments in California are sitting empty, because it is still better to have an empty apartment than having a poor person living there and paying you money. Any laws that force people to build low quality homes will just mean no one builds at all.
People always want to control everything, and when there is a problem they think they can fix it by forcing everyone to do what they want. No one ever wants to consider that it is them that is causing the problem in the first place.
Huh, you are absolutely right. The internet is full of articles saying the exact opposite, but none of them compare California to other states. Turns out this is part of a push, by certain political groups, to introduce even more laws to disadvantage landlords into the California property market, and I fell for it. Thanks for setting me straight on that.
We have a thing in Melbourne where empty places can be fined. They can track by utilities use. There's a process for appeal etc etc but it amounts to: "you have a liveable place, let someone live there"
I have no problem with this. If investors argue it is a shit deal, that is fine, get out of the market and let someone who wants to live there buy it.
I firmly believe that housing cannot be both an investment market AND affordable for everyone.
By some definition of 'expensive', probably there are more expensive apartments in NY, LA, and SF than anywhere else in the country. Those are probably the top three cities.
The reason rents and sale prices are high is that people love living in those areas.
> socialist like governments
How do you define that? Loaded terms are important to define; otherwise they become, 'whatever I think', which means different things to the writer and reader.
Alternatively you could just not make building housing illegal. the mor regulation you add the more expensive things are going to be and the more opportunities there are for corruption. The harder you make building housing (the more regulations there are) the more expensive housing is going to be. If housing is expensive homelessness will rise.
Alternatively you could be like San Francisco and lard on regulations "meant" to help that have the effect of reducing supply, resulting in a large homeless population, since people want to live there.
Better yet, you can just have the government build the housing.
The state has all the information it needs, and anything it doesn't have it can find out by mandating businesses comply. It then figures out exactly the housing needs in a given location and build that housing. It doesn't need to be fancy and wasteful like the private market tends to build. It's meant to just house people efficiently. It would be a lot cheaper than current options and we can be sure there's enough supply. It could distribute the housing based on needs. Family of 4 gets a bigger apartment than a single person.
Next you zone for type of housing, where you only allow a certain percentage of the most profitable 1BR apartments to be built, and require those to be above certain size thresholds so that a variety of life situations can actually live in your city.
You don't need to "incentivize" construction, the people that do that already make enormous amounts of money.