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A proposal to roll back exclusionary zoning would make housing more affordable

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Re: A proposal to roll back exclusionary zoning would make housing more affordable

#151

Post by notfromhere »

saosebastiao wrote: post #54
timr wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't just cherry pick a single factor: Tokyo sprawls, but it's not especially dense. It has smaller buildings, much smaller apartments, and higher costs per square foot. Japan has better transit than the west, which makes long-distance commutes feasible. Moreover, there's a culture (and a tax system) that treats housing as a depreciating asset. On top of all of that, the Japanese tend to live together in communa…

Fixation on anything other than housing supply is fixating on irrelevant noise. That includes density...there are plenty of dense cities that nonetheless restrict new supply and are thus unaffordable. Other affordable first world cities have accomplished the same thing as Tokyo via other means, including social housing (Vienna, Singapore), sprawl (Houston, Louisville), and density (Chicago, Montreal). There is one th…

Chicago is cheap because the city lost nearly a million people in the last 60 years. But if you limit it to the places folks moving to the city move, it is not cheap.

Chicago city average really hides the fact that the places most people would consider living in Chicago aren't super cheap; still cheap-ish when compared to other coastal cities

Re: A proposal to roll back exclusionary zoning would make housing more affordable

#152

Post by zjaffee »

imgabe wrote: post #8
xvedejas wrote: post #3

In Japan, zoning is handled federally; and the result is much more affordable cities. "Why Tokyo is the land of rising home construction but not prices" https://www.ft.com/content/023562e2-54a6-11e6-befd-2fc0c26b3... An overview of zoning practices there: http://urbankchoze.blogspot.com/2014/04/japanese-zoning.html

I feel like this is the case for a lot of the differences between the US and other countries. Unfortunately, it's not as simple as "just make the Federal government do it for everyone". The constitution limits the authority of what the Federal government can do in the US and delegates everything else to state and local governments.

You could easily make an argument that lack of proper zoning in California has resulted in people moving elsewhere and that invokes the interstate commerce clause.

Re: A proposal to roll back exclusionary zoning would make housing more affordable

#153

Post by mendelsd »

mrec wrote: post #150
mendelsd wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Land by its nature is scarce. A site in Mayfair cannot be reproduced like a pair of shoes. The monopoly rent it commands plays no productive role. It acts as a private tax on the productive economy. The question has always been what can be done about it." [1] I posted that quote because it's the reference I found most speedily to the idea that high land prices impose private (i.e. paid into the private sector) taxat…

> high land prices impose private (i.e. paid into the private sector) taxation, rather than public Agreed, though I'm not sure that's much consolation to the ones paying it. With public taxation at least you can hope you're helping to fund something useful.

Indeed!

BTW, you mentioned reservations about possible overspending by Corbyn's Labour. I'm encouraged however by the noises they're making about productivity, e.g. in a recent report:

"The report’s guiding idea is to encourage finance to flow towards productive investment rather than speculation in property. This reflects an old complaint about the City of London: it is a global entrepot with little interest in promoting productive investment in the UK." [1]

And here is a very good primer on the important distinction between productive and unproductive credit. [2]

[1] https://www.ft.com/content/c59c189e-85b8-11e8-a29d-73e3d4545...

[2] https://youtu.be/N-FDdHj7rPk

Re: A proposal to roll back exclusionary zoning would make housing more affordable

#154

Post by elif »

educationdata wrote: post #83
xvedejas wrote: post #3

In Japan, zoning is handled federally; and the result is much more affordable cities. "Why Tokyo is the land of rising home construction but not prices" https://www.ft.com/content/023562e2-54a6-11e6-befd-2fc0c26b3... An overview of zoning practices there: http://urbankchoze.blogspot.com/2014/04/japanese-zoning.html

Is there any data to support that Tokyo has more affordable apartment than New York? I have seen numbers compare rental price of 1/2/3 bedroom(s) in Tokyo to New York [1,2], but I do not trust those numbers, because they do not have the size of the apartment. I think it really matters, because apartments in Tokyo could be much smaller than those in NYC. I don't have a statistics for this, but there is an example [3].…

Tokyo is anomalous to the entire world.

There is no city like it in terms of population density. It is literally NYC + LA + Chicago, the largest 3 US metropolises, combined.

It would make more sense to use a remotely comparable city for comparison, like Osaka (still larger than any US metro)

Re: A proposal to roll back exclusionary zoning would make housing more affordable

#155

Post by jgeada »

Epenthesis wrote: post #138
FussyZeus wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because we can make more computers, execute more healthcare services, etc. Land is a zero sum game; we have a fixed amount, and while it's possible to create more, it's prohibitively expensive to do so. Add to it, land is the primary method by which "old money" remains in that category.

Land is zero sum (which is why a Land Value Tax is such a good idea), but housing , which is what people actually consume is not. We have the technology to build more housing, just not the regulatory regime, which is what this article is about.

That is the most significant comment here. People keep going on about land when the real problem is housing. US housing density is awfully low. Our country's major population expansion took place after the car and our model of building cities went horizontal rather than vertical.

Re: A proposal to roll back exclusionary zoning would make housing more affordable

#156

Post by mendelsd »

mrec wrote: post #120
mywittyname wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Banks love mortgages because they are easy, safe ways to earn a bit more than the federal rate. Wealthy consumers love mortgages because it's a cheap way to leverage a huge asset for market-rate returns. Normal consumers love mortgages because it allows them to buy a house. Good luck taking that away. Additionally, while access to credit raises housing prices, there's no guarantee that removing access to that credit…

Mortgages per se aren't the problem; low rates and high LTV are the problem. I agree that changing this is politically difficult, and it's downright depressing to see discussion threads on the topic filled wall-to-wall with turkeys demanding more Christmas, but there are limits to how far credit bubbles can take you, and there are signs we may finally be getting there. Big mortgages would rapidly become a lot less po…

Sorry to post this link at you again, but the problem is a high ratio of financial credit to productive credit: https://youtu.be/N-FDdHj7rPk

Low rates, high LTV, and government guarantees all help to keep that ratio high.

Re: A proposal to roll back exclusionary zoning would make housing more affordable

#157

Post by platinumrad »

tptacek wrote: post #77
kazinator wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's right; so why would Japan have developed exclusionary zoning, when the question doesn't even arise that the vast majority your neighbors will be other than Japanese wherever you go, with the help of national policies that help keep it that way.

I don't understand the question. Japan is intensely racist and xenophobic, probably significantly more so than the US.

Their point was that Japan is ethnically and culturally homogeneous enough that they don't feel the need to implement exclusionary zoning, regardless of how racist and xenophobic the general population is.

Re: A proposal to roll back exclusionary zoning would make housing more affordable

#158

Post by zepto »

dionidium wrote: post #86
burlesona wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Federal zoning would be really difficult to get done constitutionally, but state level zoning wouldn’t be as hard and would have most of the same benefits, ie. reducing the power the nimbys. However there’s no reason to think that would fix it all, transportation planning, design, and funding is almost entirely a state and federal affair, and the nimbys still torpedo all sorts of things that would be great for the re…

> Federal zoning would be really difficult to get done constitutionally Would it? I feel like this has Commerce Clause uber alles written all over it.

How is zoning about interstate commerce?

Re: A proposal to roll back exclusionary zoning would make housing more affordable

#159

Post by zepto »

zjaffee wrote: post #152
imgabe wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like this is the case for a lot of the differences between the US and other countries. Unfortunately, it's not as simple as "just make the Federal government do it for everyone". The constitution limits the authority of what the Federal government can do in the US and delegates everything else to state and local governments.

You could easily make an argument that lack of proper zoning in California has resulted in people moving elsewhere and that invokes the interstate commerce clause.

Someone moving to another state is not interstate commerce.

Re: A proposal to roll back exclusionary zoning would make housing more affordable

#160

Post by mendelsd »

bradleyjg wrote: post #5

The charts at the top are eye opening. More and more of our income is going to pay for pieces of land. Unlike computers, TVs, and even troublesome areas like healthcare the land is not getting better and better. It’s instead a purely zero sum game. We probably can’t eliminate the scourge of land rents altogether but we can stop making the problem worse by putting in place more and more policies designed to raise hous…

Governments aren't striving for ideal outcomes - government is necessarily a bunch of scoundrels whose chief goal is to stay in power, which is achieved by giving sufficient bungs to donors and voters:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11612989-the-dictator-s-...

Sorry to ruin your day ;-)

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