I guess that's to be expected when those parents are the ones going to all the planning commission and city council meetings to put a stop to the construction of housing.
Along similar lines of thinking it would be really nice if the young people would vote as consistently as the old people.
I'm in between generations and watching the old vs young bickering / division is painful to see... but I've also got a low tolerance for a lot of the "OMG boomers" stuff out there from folks who as a whole have a really poor voting record. Get in the game people....
Even if they did vote, a lot of the politically active young renters oppose new development since they see it as gentrification or only enriching real estate developers or only building luxury housing.
If you increase the supply of housing, it puts downward pressure on rent
That's the bug right there. Rental housing is a popular investment vehicle, at a ROI of 9.5 % it slightly outperforms the stock market. Any regulation and anything that would decrease profit will be stridently opposed by the wealthy classes. They go and vote and sit on the city council.
I think part of it is due to lack of understanding, you see new buildings being built that are going to rent out at the high range, and you think nobody actually affected by lack of housing will benefit from it. People who think differently ought to do a better job explaining to the general public why building luxury housing can help the people not living in luxury housing
It’s also frustrating because new housing is always necessarily market rate, and when the market rate is ridiculous, new housing is ridiculous. I live in “luxury” apartments from 1970, and even though I live in an expensive city, my rent is decently reasonable for the area (plus, I would hardly describe my unit as luxurious, unless you consider shoddy craftsmanship and ugly decor luxury). Point is: new is market rate, and market rate is expensive. So people see new apartments go up with market rates and assume that it’s just intentional gouging vs a reaction to market forces. And this doesn’t even touch things like how zoning encourages buildings like this, etc.
luxury housing doesn't have a fixed luxury price; it just tends to be more expensive than lower end housing. I just moved into a relatively expensive apartment that is at the upper edge of what I can afford. rent in this area is actually experiencing a bit of downward pressure because several new high-end apartment buildings are going up at the same time. previously I was renting a place that was much cheaper. if the new place had been $100 more expensive, I wouldn't have moved. but I did move, and now someone with less money can live in the place I moved out of. the new building I moved into has many more units than the townhouses it replaced. if enough people like me move into it, they will no longer be bidding up the lower end housing.
I agree! I’m saying we should explain this phenomenon of luxury housing supply opening up more lower end units to people, rather than throwing our hands in the air and lamenting that people just don’t get it
Building new buildings still displaces people, and in many cases the new buildings do not replace the existing affordable units with an equivalent number of affordable units. Even if they do keep parity, the people need to be moved out (and moved around) for years, and finding section 8 housing can be a challenge. Moving can be costly and exhausting.
Even if you do move back into the same neighborhood after construction is complete and your rent isn't impacted too much (which is not a super common outcome), it's likely the community around you has changed. Gentrification increases the costs of basic food, clothing, and other resources in your area. You're local diner might be replaced with a wagyu beef slinging $15 hamburger joint. It's doing brisk business, but you can't afford to eat there. Your old dinged and dented grocery store or market stall is now a fancy Whole Foods.
That's not to say it's impossible to build or improve neighborhoods, but it's also not so easy as 'just build more on top of existing units.' The disruption and displacement of hundreds or thousands of lives for years is significant.
There's a healthy debate around how best to deal with this -- do we just bite the bullet and build a TON of housing all at once? Do we try to preserve the residency of the people currently living there and build up opportunistically? Do we try to decommodify housing altogether to remove the incentives that lead to this situation? (If we priced housing based on how well it provided housing, rather than based on what the market would bear, we'd see a different sort of situation, I'd imagine.) I dunno, maybe the combination is all three.
> do we just bite the bullet and build a TON of housing all at once?
Yes, we absolutely should. I live in a tract house/neighborhood from the 40s in the East Bay, which is a cookie cutter house that was constructed en mass, and was cheap (For the time) and high quality. I believe the house was initially purchased for something like ~8k (~140k in 2019 money), but it is worth many more times than that solely because no more housing has been built en mass since the war.
We should of course move onto building multifamily homes, and away from the mess SFH suburbia created, but the principle remains the same: More housing availability pushes down prices for everyone.
Gentrification is a really complex issue, because on one hand it is objectively improving an area, and on the other, basically anybody without housing equity (ie a mortgage) in the gentrifying area gets screwed.
I think it needs to be solved at a macro level, in a way that is nuanced and delicate. Because on one hand, assuming the rest of the world doesn’t change, making an area nicer to live is objectively good. And upper middle class people deserve housing too, and landowners perhaps should have at least some level of control over what they do with their property (you can argue that landlording in general could be abolished, but that’s a separate discussion).
Of course on the other hand, it is a shame that poor people have to fight to keep their neighborhoods shitty so that they don’t get displaced to somewhere far away from their jobs and community.
I’m not sure if there’s a great economic solution that still involves a market housing economy. The least worst solution I can think of is to basically carve out special units for the exact people displaced. IE if I want to built a 300 unit condo tower in West Oakland taking up a whole block, I have to provide current-market-rate rents for all the people currently living in that block.
I agree there is some nuance, but a lot of the reason why people move in and build in that poorer area is that they've been zoned out of the wealthier area where it's impossible to build any new housing at all.
New building that has been blocked in SF would replace a laundromat, chained lot that used to be a McDonalds, a Walgreens. Who exactly would have been displaced by any of those?
The argument that building new buildings "displaces" people is nonsense. In fact, I'd argue that more people are displaced by not building, due to supply constraints. Wealthy people will always be able to outbid others, and if supply doesn't keep up with demand people will be displaced.
Also, nobody is entitled to live anywhere they want at whatever price they want. It's this attitude that drives so many "affordable" housing programs that are complete failures (and a tax on the middle class).
Even in the best cases (i.e. where there isn't intentional voter suppression and gerrymandering), this is a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem. In my Seattle, for instance, city candidates will usually spend most of their canvassing efforts on (wealthier, older) homeowners rather than (pooorer, younger) renters. They do this because they know that homeowners will vote at much higher rates than renters. Yet this is something of a self-fulfilling prophecy: renters are also less likely to vote because none of the candidates have bothered reaching out to them.
So it's generally hard - for good reason - to persuade young people that any of the political candidates on the slate care about them. This has only barely begun to change recently.
Most of this isn’t due to voting but due to attendance / activism which retirees have a far greater ability to engage in without destroying work life balance.
The young people are often too busy working and generally trying to survive. They can't take time off to go vote, not to mention the gerrymandering where districts filled with retirees and the wealthy are prioritized.
If you want to fix voting for the younger generation the barriers to actually vote need to be lessened if not removed.
I don't agree with you being downvoted here...take another issue that is disproportionately effecting the young: Student Loans.
Every year more than 1M people default on their student loans, ruining their credit and essentially their lives.
Currently this is a voting block of 8M people and it will continue to grow by 1M every year. There is one candidate who has promised to forgive all student loans, and yet the person won't garner anywhere close to 8M votes.
There is a coordinated effort to indebt young people with loans they will spend the next 40-50 years of their life paying. Their degrees won't even pay for themselves as evidence by the fact these young people who historically could at least move out and begin their lives are no longer able to afford to do so...and when these issues are mentioned people are silenced (or downvoted into the grey so their comments can't be read).
There is more to this than young people don't vote, especially where they have every reason.
I think that is a fair point (although certainly we wouldn't find even distribution of these people across the States, but I can't provide the statistical breakdown).
However, 8 Million is the potential voting block of people who have already defaulted on their student loans...there are a total of 44.7 Million people with student loans who all would be interested and benefit from loan forgiveness/abatement. To put those numbers in perspective it it just exceeds the number of elderly voters on Medicare (44 Million).
I don't think you'll find much sympathy for those who take out college loans beyond what their future occupation will realistically support in a forum like this.
People of all ages have always been too busy working and generally trying to survive. That's a wretched excuse for not exercising your franchise and worthy of the contempt that gets piled on whiny entitled people that expect some kind of trophy just for showing up at the polls.
> People of all ages have always been too busy working and generally trying to survive.
Traditionally older people tend to have (or have had) more set schedules/defined work hours, more benefits (paid time off), and better job security in general. I'm not saying it's impossible for kids today to vote, but there are some disturbing trends in employment and the way workers are treated that I can see making it harder than it's been for previous generations.
Previous generations were able to support themselves at least enough to move out of their parent's homes. Young adults today are clearly struggling in ways that past generations haven't had to and that's going to strain how much time and effort they can spend on local and state politics.
Of course none of that addresses the larger issues like voter disenfranchisement and gerrymandering which limit the impact of voters making the effort seem less worthwhile.
I still think young people should do everything the can to get involved and vote, but I'm not going to pretend that any mention of their struggles can be dismissed by calling them "whiny entitled people"
This is an inaccurate assessment, even in states like WA where all voting is done by mail and you have few weeks to actually do it, young people don't vote as much.
Young people’s brains have a lot going on and it’s hard to prioritize. Old folks already had their learning experiences of forgetting to vote or seeing the repercussions of not voting. No one is at fault per se and this is just a natural reflection of how people learn over time.
I happened to turn 18 right in time to vote in a [US] presidential election year. I've made a point to vote in every election I can from that point on.
Did I have "a lot going on"? Sure. Do I have utter faith in "The Government" and//or "The Voting Process"? Not really.
But I still vote. It's my right and also, as I've come to see it, my duty. Free speech or no, I believe that if I want to complain about an election and be taken seriously I should participate in it at at least the bare minimal active level.
Like the parent comment said, there is a noticeable difference even in states like Washington. We have close to two weeks to fill out the ballots and mail it back or drop it off. There is a huge difference between "having a lot going on" and "procrastinating for two weeks". the ballots take ~5 minutes to fill out, and ~10 minutes to drop off.
"The young people are often too busy working and generally trying to survive"
I find this a very questionable statement. Most middle age people are working 40+ hours, on top of devoting hours to kids, maintenance etc. They are every bit as busy as young people, if not more so.
Politicians respond to only 2 things, votes and lobbyist dollars. If people want to make a change and have politicians stop ignoring them then they need to establish themselves as a reliable voting block. Until they do this they are just shouting into the wind / twitter / reddit / facebook.
Voting by absentee ballot takes minutes, everyone who want to has time for that.
When I moved to Washington [state] I was amazed that I could vote by mail -- and by default, too.
Since moving to California after that, I've voted by mail as much as possible, and I literally live right next door to my polling station; I see it and their parking spots right out my bedrooms' windows every day.
Young people have as much or more time than other groups.
Seniors have time but have trouble getting to the pols.
Middle age - Are working/picking up kids but still find time.
I think younger people see through the effectiveness of voting. If I do vote my vote seems to really not matter. If all young people vote as a block maybe an issue will be mentioned or moved towards something I like. But the effort / reward doesn't add up when the election is decided in the mid-west and the election is called before my vote is even records as a California resident.
It seems crazy that you are given two choices that basically blame each for everything gone wrong or take credit for everything positive but do the same thing when given the chance.
Liking a photo is so much more rewarding and feels like more of a direct impact.
> I think younger people see through the effectiveness of voting. If I do vote my vote seems to really not matter.
As long as young people keep thinking like that, and old people don't, old people will keep winning elections.
> If all young people vote as a block maybe an issue will be mentioned or moved towards something I like. But the effort / reward doesn't add up when the election is decided in the mid-west and the election is called before my vote is even records as a California resident.
How many elections have you voted in or been eligible to vote in where a single vote being added or removed would have changed the outcome? Zero? Cool, me too.
Voting is not economically rational if it takes more than zero time, given those odds.
When so many people beat the drum of economic rationality, is it a surprise people don't vote? At most one of "economic rationality is valid" or "you should vote" is a true statement. When we're told that the former is true, we're being told not to vote.
There are modifications of "rationality" that actually provide a justification for voting. But you'll never see an economist acknowledge that superrationality is a thing, for instance.
Voting is a civic duty for a functional democracy. I don't understand the rampant defeatism I see in the "deliberate nonvoting" bloc, but the outcome seems obvious enough.
> How many elections have you voted in or been eligible to vote in where a single vote being added or removed would have changed the outcome? Zero? Cool, me too.
Is a thing only worth doing if you can cast yourself as the lone hero who turned the tide?
This seems like the Tragedy of the Commons. You fish in a stream, because why not? One person can never eat enough fish to make a dent in the population. Then a thousand of your neighbors fish the same stream. Soon it's completely depopulated, and there are no more fish for anyone, and everyone involved can still say "it wasn't my fault, my impact was barely noticeable."
Either it's nobody's fault, just a totally unavoidable act of God, or it's everybody's fault, and you all should have worked together to address it. Only one of those ways of thinking will get anything done.
> How many elections have you voted in or been eligible to vote in where a single vote being added or removed would have changed the outcome? Zero? Cool, me too.
So if you aren't the one, single deciding vote it's not worthwhile? That's an immature approach. All the more immature because you go on to couch it in rhetoric about economics and "rationality" that amounts to nothing more than third rate sophistry.
You're not a taxi cab that has to be in service 24 hours a day to maximize utilization. You're a person with responsibilities. Your "economic rationality" is just a lazy justification for only doing what you feel like doing ("provides marginal value!") and never doing anything you don't.
If you're going to be a bum, be honest with yourself and those around you.
I would guess that comparison to be very misleading. Singles presumably don't want to live in the countryside, they want to live in big cities with jobs and other people they could meet. In big cities, there tends to be little space for building, so especially little space for building 3 car garages.
So I would guess most 3 car garages are built in the countryside, where there is lots of space for building.
The two numbers point to completely separate issues.
If singles would be willing to move to the countryside, perhaps they wouldn't have a problem to find accommodation. (A job could be a different matter).
I think this is selection bias, because all of the junk old homes have fallen apart or been torn down by now. I get what you're saying though: older houses tend to use more real wood and bricks and other materials which are now done with cheaper, modern equivalents like drywall and plywood.
China is so populous that their largest cities are running up against the current technological limits of housing density. Beijing is especially challenging - it’s hard to build any more densely there without very careful planning; the city’s development could be warped by the Marchetti constant.
North American cities are sparse and are nowhere near our tech limits. Housing shortages in North America are due to nothing more than bad regulation.
The problem old people have with apartments is that they attract perceived ne'er-do-wells with little financial resources. Harold the Retiree does not want to hear your Subaru with the fart cannon on the back going up and down the road while he's trying to watch the sun set on his back porch, doesn't want your drug dealer causing trouble on his block, and certainly doesn't care to see your piercings and tattoos in the grocery store.
> doesn't care to see your piercings and tattoos in the grocery store.
Harold can fuck right off then because that's not his business. The other two, could potentially be an issue, however, but in my experience, most apartments like that are not filled with retirees, but working class individuals and to an extent working class families.
>>>> doesn't care to see your piercings and tattoos in the grocery store.
>>Harold can fuck right off then because that's not his business.
Don't come to Japan then. [1][2] Like it or not, some cultures (including the older generation of Americans) hold certain social mores that include expectations of public appearance and decorum.
Harold has freedom of movement, just as you and I do. If Harold can afford to live in a neighbourhood where tattoos and piercings guy can’t, who are we to stop him?
The real problem with gentrification is the unearned increase in property values that accrue to owners and not renters. This could be solved with Georgist land value taxes [1].
I spent a lot of time in Italy, and there, rather than SFH for 'good' people here, and rent-only apartments for 'bad' people there, you have a lot more 4/6/8/10 unit buildings where you own the single unit and can either live in it or rent it out. So things are a lot more mixed. I think this leads to more integration and better outcomes.
The house I live in currently is exactly this. It's a block of townhouses (20ish total), grouped in sets of 4, where each person owns their individual unit. We have a pretty diverse mix of people, and I quite like it.
What’s more amazing to me is that the young generation sees these central-planning bureaucrats lock down freedom to build (via increased legislation, permitting, etc) and then days “yeah! Send those people to the federal government!”
Seriously though, no matter how efficient we get with our space, eventually we'll hit a wall and the solution is going to be exactly the same as it always was and is: reproduce less quickly.
The only difference is how much nature will be left when we get to that point.
I've started to look at houses with yards as miniature nature preserves.
To Downvoters: I feel I've done a decent job outlining the futility of more and more compact housing. I'd like to know what your logic if you disagree.
Nonetheless, it took until 2010 for Japan's total population to peak and begin to decline. It's estimated to take until 2042 for Japan's population to fall lower than it was in 1975:
That's a 67 year lag between a country reducing birth rates below replacement and the country actually having more space available per capita.
So I downvoted you on two counts:
1) You seemed to be unaware that the US is already reproducing less, to the extent that its population will eventually decline without immigration.
2) "Reproduce less" takes a very long time to reduce total population. It takes many decades even if there is no immigration. Its influence is far too slow to help today's young adults afford their own living spaces.
> the US is already reproducing less,
I am aware. Every civilization thus far has done this as technology advances. But it's a lot more happenstance than intentional. We're not actively trying to have less children for the sake of making anything better.
> "Reproduce less" takes a very long time
Pretty much every real solution to any problem I have ever seen takes generations. If the point of more housing is to mitigate suffering while these changes take root, that sounds realistic and responsible. As it is, it sounds like nobody has any thoughts at all about when we should realistically cap ourselves and I don't think that's responsible.
There's only a dereliction of responsibility if a trend is going in the wrong direction and nobody thinks about how it can be reversed. If something that you want to happen is already happening, and you understand that it's going to take a long time regardless of how much active planning is involved, you don't need to do anything but wait.
> There's only a dereliction of responsibility if a trend is going in the wrong direction and nobody thinks about how it can be reversed
It appears your argument is that reproducing less is good, but we're already doing it (though not on purpose), so therefore me saying we should do it on purpose is wrong?
Okay, here's the thesis. Sounds like neo-Malthusianism.
> Seriously though, no matter how efficient we get with our space, eventually we'll hit a wall and the solution is going to be exactly the same as it always was and is: reproduce less quickly.
Yep, that's the Malthusian endgame. Unpacking this claim, it seems to be claiming that the Earth is a closed-system that we can't escape. Now I'm looking for evidence or supporting arguments that prove that.
> The only difference is how much nature will be left when we get to that point.
What exactly does the phrase "how much nature will be left" mean to you? This is too hand-wavy, especially for such a heavy-handed conclusion.
> I've started to look at houses with yards as miniature nature preserves.
Is a golf course a nature preserve? No. Of course not. It's an extremely controlled environment. Any wildlife foolish enough to try to inhabit it that doesn't fit in a coffee cup will almost certainly be chased off, trapped or killed.
Backyards do provide a nature preserve for a city. They take heat away and allows birds/raccoons/squirrels/butterflies a place to eat/rest. If they all were converted to apartments the city would be worse off. A balance of both makes sense.
We could house trillions of people on the earth in skyscrapers if we needed to. We could even feed them with nuclear powered greenhouses. There are lots of reasons we don't want to do that. Room isn't one of them.
Physical area we could potentially pack people into isn't really the problem. There are a lot of other considerations like biocapacity and employment options which are also important concerns. We could put a lot of people in remote parts of the world but where will they work? Shop? Those places often lack the kinds of critical infrastructure that would attract and sustain a thriving population.
I think overpopulation isn't our most pressing issue right now, but generally there are a lot of advantages to having fewer people.
They lack infrastructure because there isn't the demand for infrastructure. We build where there is demand, and the building creates further demand. It's a self-reinforcing cycle.
This a bad argument for several reasons. 1) Most predictions already have the population leveling off around 9-11 billion people. 2) the economy is designed for an ever expanding population. There are be very serious negative economic repercussions to stalled or negative population growth. 3) There is no moral way to enforce this, so whats the point of even bringing it up?
We need less people in places that cannot support having as many people as they already have. Building sprawling exurbs in the southwestern deserts comes to mind. Or some other cases that cannot be acknowledged in polite company.
Most developed nations are below replacement rate, and you don't have to look far in places like the northeast or midwest of the US to see places that are going to seed and reverting back into wilderness.
Well, unless you wanna get all Stalin-y, the current people are here to stay, and we have more than enough space to house them. I don’t wanna hear any nonsense about not having enough room. Saying “we have too many people” isn’t a solution, it’s just a falsehood.
Really single-family-only zoning should be banned by federal law. Force cities to build duplexes/triplexes/four-plexes everywhere. We're stuck in this stupid single-family-or-idiotic-"luxury"-condo idiocy because of that.
Can we have proper building standards first? Right now, the level of noise insulation in the US is abysmal, consequently no one will move into a multiplex unless they absolutely have to. That's why the perception that multiplexes attract undesirables is actually justified, and no one wants them and their externalities in their neighbourhood of single-family housing.
I live in a concrete high rise and I don’t really notice any noise from my neighbors (the street noise is much, much worse as emergency sirens pierce even double-pane windows).
There are also plenty of multiplex designs that have good noise insulation.
In reality people do want to live in them which is why zoning laws are used to prevent them from being built. If people refused to live there, there would be no need for zoning as developers wouldn’t build homes people don’t live in.
Me too. However, everywhere I've lived previously has been awful with neighbor noise. Duplexes are less likely to sound like our giant concrete quiet buildings and more likely to sound like my old noisy as hell places.
I lived in an apartment in Montreal where the guy below me would invite hookers over, snort coke and get strangled, you could hear him getting chocked and the crack pipe being 'tink tinked' beforehand, then the high heels walking out of his den at 0230 in the morning lol. Noise insulation is very important!
Requiring noise insulation would drive the cost up. A better option would be to have optional noise mitigation measurements done in a cheap way so that buildings could certify for a given level of noise transmission between units.
You would have each unit certified as either A, B or C. C being nearly no noise insulation, A being very quiet.
Construction costs are very high in the Bay Area, and it is one component that holds back the construction of ADUs (in-law units) wchi hostage requires cities to support.
Of course, then you’d ask, well why are construction costs so high in the Bay Area? And you might hear something about earthquakes, insulation, whatever. But the real reason is that contractors and construction workers need to live here too, and living here is damn expensive!
Noise insulation isn't a type of material, it's a construction method. Hanging drywall on resilient channel, staggering 2x4 studs on 2x6 bottom and top plates and weaving insulation between them, solid doors, and dual/triple pane windows are all examples of this.
> Let the market decide what they want to pay for.
You're making an assumption that noise insulation is particularly subject to the market. Unfortunately noise 'insulation' like other insulation is extremely sensitive to competence in instiallation and maintenance.
Because it isn't particularly easy to gauge when shopping I don't believe that it is... and in markets where there are more prospective renters than units, it especially isn't.
The market has already decided that any noise insulation is too much of a cost. That's why there's a bunch of incredibly cheap apartment complexes springing up around Austin with the bare minimum of effort.
And since housing is a zero sum game the market is already rigged in favor of landlords. People generally don't have as much choice where to live when you start considering school access, public transit, commute and so forth. Relying on the market to solve housing will simply result in miniature SFs popping up over the US, just like what's happening to Austin.
That law was simply re-passed with the clause "has moved in or otherwise affects interstate commerce." as noted on the link.
A similar clause could be attached to the mentioned zoning law. (E.g. a person from one state buys land in another state? No zoning allowed - and because buying land within a state affects the prices for interstate purchases, suddenly there’s a nexus for regulation of purely intrastate purchases too!)
Not saying it’s a great idea, but it’s hardly clearly unconstitutional under modern precedent and interpretation.
Wickard v. Filburn was a new-deal-era case adjudicated when the court operated under threat of being packed by Roosevelt if it did not comply [0].
A strict constructionist reading of the constitution would suggest that Gonzales v. Raich is judicial activism, and indeed, all the judges signatory to the majority opinion tend to be the "big government" types. Note that O'Connor and Rehnquist, two famous justices who often sided with strict constructionism, dissented. O'Connor wrote that though she did not support California's actions, she respected its right to do so:
"Relying on Congress’ abstract assertions, the Court has endorsed making it a federal crime to grow small amounts of marijuana in one’s own home for one’s own medicinal use. This overreaching stifles an express choice by some States, concerned for the lives and liberties of their people, to regulate medical marijuana differently. If I were a California citizen, I would not have voted for the medical marijuana ballot initiative; if I were a California legislator I would not have supported the Compassionate Use Act. But whatever the wisdom of California’s experiment with medical marijuana, the federalism principles that have driven our Commerce Clause cases require that room for experiment be protected in this case. "
Thomas also dissented, for somewhat similar principles though with different wording. Source for this is your link.
We don't implement things like this federally because needs differ. Bozeman, Montana can probably zone and sprawl as needed; it's small and there's lots of land. San Francisco can't. Why would any one feel the need to apply the same rules to both, unless it was an attempt to force a particular ideology on another? If there is sufficient support for something, it ought to pass just as well at the state or local level.
We don't implement things like this federally because needs differ. Bozeman, Montana can probably zone and sprawl as needed; it's small and there's lots of land. San Francisco can't.
If Bozeman, Montana can sprawl without worry, why does it even need restrictive zoning laws mandating SFH’s? That’s what doesn’t make sense. People who move to Bozeman clearly want to live in SFH’s. Outlawing restrictive zoning laws doesn’t affect them in the least.
Arguably most of the US government is unconstitutional under such a strict constructionist view of the constitution.
In practice, considering home construction and home buying are often transacted in interstate commerce (e.g. a company buying parts or supplies from out of state to build), it’s likely a Supreme Court case against a law relating to zoning could be upheld. The federal government already claims the ability to regulate other things such as guns constructed within the borders of a state and never moved outside them, all based on the arguments upheld in cases like Wickard that they possibly could affect interstate commerce.
We could have zoning that allows for either and let the market decide. I'm sure no developer will build a giant condo tower in the middle of rural nowhere.
Multi-family housing "in the middle of nowhere" could look appetizing for reducing municipal costs. You need a lot more roads, power/water lines, in single residence communities than in urban areas.
Declining tax bases in rural areas will be death by a thousand cuts. It takes serious cash for a municipality to
"keep the lights on".
This may sound slightly contrary to my prior opinion, but there ought be a middle ground between the free choice of wanting a SFH, but also having some level of community planning that ensures the community remains viable.
A common pattern for that kind of thing is small condo buildings with 4 to 6 units, run as co-ops by the unit owners (no HOA or management company). It's a simple way to get some economy of scale benefits in general maintenance and public utilities, and to have a few neighbors to deter crime that might otherwise target isolated homes.
Yeah I would disagree with that. We should remove as many barriers to that kind of housing as possible, but no one knows the 'correct' mix of housing options in any given city.
Speak for you own state or city. My city has no problem with sane development of single family homes, townhomes, condos/apartments and high rise housing.
Metro Atlanta. I watched 3 high rises go up in the span of a year when I worked downtown, 1 catering to Georgia Tech students and 2 for anyone (with a huge focus on young adults). The in-town area I just moved from started addressing concerns about single family homes by working with developers to build high density apartments and lofts. They passed “workforce” zoning for housing to combat gentrification[1].
This opinion would generate a lot of justifiable anger from families who love their homes and live in areas that aren't under high housing pressure, but I suspect that you didn't mean to say that this should be applied literally everywhere.
Banning single family zoning would eventually cause single family homes to disappear. Without legal limits, the market will always converge on what’s most profitable to developers, which is currently “stuffing as many units as legal/possible into the space.”
This type of construction is only so profitable because it's usually illegal, and therefore a critically undersupplied segment of the market. Developers are therefore eager to do it every chance they get. If it were legal to build this way everywhere, they would only do it in the places it made sense. Developers wouldn't be building 4-story condos in Contra Costa county for people to commute 50 miles into SF and Mountain View if they were alowed to build enough to meet demand in SF and Mountain View.
Where people want to build, the power-hungry folks in charge put restrictions in place and demand a troll toll to let a few projects through. And the folks in charge where nobody wants to build see the opportunity and seize it. It's just human nature, and it's the reason local government shouldn't be put in charge of density regulation.
There is plenty of single family housing in Italy, where I lived for many years, and where most other housing types are legal.
If someone is happy in their SFH, why would it disappear?
If someone has the money, they'll be able to build new ones too.
Yeah, maybe central San Francisco won't have many, as people cash out, but that seems pretty reasonable. You can go live in Lakeview Oregon and have a huge house on a huge lot if that's what you want.
The absolute construction costs for a high-rise are a lot higher than for a low-rise 4 story apartment building. If I can't fill a high-rise in your city, why would I build it? I'm better off building the low-rise and selling-through.
Besides - SFH's predate most restrictive zoning laws (which really caught on in the 70's). SFH's, at the edges of the city, aren't going anywhere.
There's many, many, many parts of the country where single family homes are fine. Just don't let people zone or over-regulate away higher density options and the market does a fine job of adding more dense forms of housing where needed.
The comment now reads "single-family-only zoning should be banned by federal law"
I distinctly recall it calling for a ban on single family housing. Considering that there are many replies calling it an overreaction and replying as thought it called for a ban on single family housing in general I would be willing to bet money it did not originally say what it says now.
The US builds more 3 car garages than 1 bedroom apartments: https://www.curbed.com/2016/10/26/13423358/three-car-garages...