Americans Voted Their Way into a Housing Crisis
bloomberg.com
Americans Voted Their Way into a Housing Crisis
1–10 of 30 posts
Re: Americans Voted Their Way into a Housing Crisis
#2America's housing situation continues to be zoning-driven. Cities where the jobs are located constrain housing supply via capricious zoning policies designed specifically to make housing more expensive. It is done to the benefit of existing landowners who vote for them, naturally, as landowners tend to be older, wealthier and voracious voters.
Sure there's plenty of houses in Detroit but you can't commute from Detroit to NYC or the Bay Area.
Single-family zoning was pioneered in Berkeley in 1916 specifically to prevent minorities from moving to white neighborhoods in Berkeley by pricing them out. After the Fair Housing Act passed outlawing restrictive covenants it became one of the most powerful lawful weapons to enforce class and race segregation in cities. [0] Now 96% of all residential land in California, over half of the Bay Area and 2/3 of SF is single-family exclusive zoning. The Bay Area, the single most economically productive place in the entire US has a population density of 600 people per square mile, in line with an average European agrarian hamlet.
Housing is not the only market in the history of the world that is immune to supply and demand. When supply is constrained to below demand, pricing rises to the highest level the market can bear. When supply exceeds demand, prices fall towards the cost of construction.
The premium capricious zoning policy in SF creates is estimated at $400,000 per unit. [1]
I don't understand how progressives took up the mantle of "no more housing thanks we're good, let's just apply rent control" as if rent control actually helps. In the face of an expanding population this is outright regressive policy. Studies in SF show that it reduced supply and increased prices. [2] If you have enough supply, prices don't increase, so you don't need rent control.
[edit] I once again remind readers that the housing market is interstate commerce and the federal government has the power to overturn all these silly zoning shenanigans. Japanese-style federalized zoning is a great way out of this. The Fair Housing Act itself was passed under the justification that housing is interstate commerce via the Dormant Commerce Clause. [3, 4]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-family_zoning
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_housing_shortage
[2] https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/faculty-research/publications/e...
[3] https://nysba.org/how-the-dormant-commerce-clause-can-fight-...
[4] https://www.justice.gov/crt/housing-and-civil-enforcement-ca...
Re: Americans Voted Their Way into a Housing Crisis
#3America's housing situation continues to be zoning-driven. Cities where the jobs are located constrain housing supply via capricious zoning policies designed specifically to make housing more expensive. It is done to the benefit of existing landowners who vote for them, naturally, as landowners tend to be older, wealthier and voracious voters. Sure there's plenty of houses in Detroit but you can't commute from Detroi…
Zoning also creates this "positive" (in the technical, not social sense) feedback loop, where housing is so expensive that it drives up the cost of any kind of local production, including housing, because labor is (now) the primary driver of construction costs in California.
That said, building codes also drive up housing construction costs: originally intended for safety, building codes now also enforce energy efficiency (including window size, insulation, etc.), accessibility, sound transmission, material selection (for reasons other than safety), beyond the usual structural design, electrical/HVAC safety, and fire concerns.
This is before we even get to planning codes (i.e., zoning) which has restrictions on lot coverage, etc. that end up causing stronger correlations between land prices and unit costs.
Re: Americans Voted Their Way into a Housing Crisis
#4America's housing situation continues to be zoning-driven. Cities where the jobs are located constrain housing supply via capricious zoning policies designed specifically to make housing more expensive. It is done to the benefit of existing landowners who vote for them, naturally, as landowners tend to be older, wealthier and voracious voters. Sure there's plenty of houses in Detroit but you can't commute from Detroi…
> via capricious zoning policies designed specifically to make housing more expensive
This coincides with treating housing as an investment. Older generations (even Gen X) will flaunt how great it is that their house went up by X% in the last 5 years. It completely ignores that housing is meant to keep a roof over your head and not be treated as a spreadsheet line item in your portfolio.
Re: Americans Voted Their Way into a Housing Crisis
#5America's housing situation continues to be zoning-driven. Cities where the jobs are located constrain housing supply via capricious zoning policies designed specifically to make housing more expensive. It is done to the benefit of existing landowners who vote for them, naturally, as landowners tend to be older, wealthier and voracious voters. Sure there's plenty of houses in Detroit but you can't commute from Detroi…
> via capricious zoning policies designed specifically to make housing more expensive This coincides with treating housing as an investment. Older generations (even Gen X) will flaunt how great it is that their house went up by X% in the last 5 years. It completely ignores that housing is meant to keep a roof over your head and not be treated as a spreadsheet line item in your portfolio.
Ah yes, I left that out but it's amazing how people continue to want housing to be both "affordable" and "a good investment" when those are fundamentally antithetical goals. A good investment gets less affordable over time.
Re: Americans Voted Their Way into a Housing Crisis
#6America's housing situation continues to be zoning-driven. Cities where the jobs are located constrain housing supply via capricious zoning policies designed specifically to make housing more expensive. It is done to the benefit of existing landowners who vote for them, naturally, as landowners tend to be older, wealthier and voracious voters. Sure there's plenty of houses in Detroit but you can't commute from Detroi…
[deleted]
Re: Americans Voted Their Way into a Housing Crisis
#7America's housing situation continues to be zoning-driven. Cities where the jobs are located constrain housing supply via capricious zoning policies designed specifically to make housing more expensive. It is done to the benefit of existing landowners who vote for them, naturally, as landowners tend to be older, wealthier and voracious voters. Sure there's plenty of houses in Detroit but you can't commute from Detroi…
Recently in Berkeley the City Council brought a resolution to just allow ADUs and jADUs within the new CA rules on any SFR parcel.
The homeowners came out in droves to complain and fight it.
Real estate is how wealth building happens in America, but in the Bay Area and many other places we can't accept that we need entry level housing - condos that trade for what a house used to cost 20 years ago ($300-500k) because nobody wants development near them and nobody wants developers making any money
We need the State (CA) or the Federal government to come in and say to cities and counties, if you deny housing development that fits within your zoning guidelines, you will be putting some important funding source at risk. Otherwise the logjam will continue
Re: Americans Voted Their Way into a Housing Crisis
#8America's housing situation continues to be zoning-driven. Cities where the jobs are located constrain housing supply via capricious zoning policies designed specifically to make housing more expensive. It is done to the benefit of existing landowners who vote for them, naturally, as landowners tend to be older, wealthier and voracious voters. Sure there's plenty of houses in Detroit but you can't commute from Detroi…
> Cities where the jobs are located constrain housing supply via capricious zoning policies designed specifically to make housing more expensive.
California is largely a special snowflake where you can have your property value go to infinity and there is NO penalty to you (your taxes only go up a max of 2%, which is less than inflation).
It seems like a trend that voters are moving their states and jurisdictions to a similar tax structure. For example, Pittsburgh hadn't reassessed property prices from like 2012 (the bottom of the Great Financial Crisis) - and is being sued by many people due to this. And I think Michigan moved to a system where there's a cap in property tax increases as well (not sure).
Other than that - everyone else gets taxed more if prices go up.
Financially, it's obviously a winning trade. But most people are too strapped in cash-flow to prefer the trade.
The average person votes for restrictions like this because everyone wants to live in the special snowflake neighborhood that is walkable and quiet and close to everything, where they have space to park their car and play with their kids in the yard, and they give negative f#cks about anyone moving in and not being able to afford even a shoebox.
They own their house and they like about it, and the could not care less about your struggles.
It's less that they are James Bond villains wanting their property prices to skyrocket. That's a side-effect.
Re: Americans Voted Their Way into a Housing Crisis
#9America's housing situation continues to be zoning-driven. Cities where the jobs are located constrain housing supply via capricious zoning policies designed specifically to make housing more expensive. It is done to the benefit of existing landowners who vote for them, naturally, as landowners tend to be older, wealthier and voracious voters. Sure there's plenty of houses in Detroit but you can't commute from Detroi…
> I don't understand how progressives took up the mantle of "no more housing thanks we're good, let's just apply rent control"
Because everyone is a YIMBY until until they own a SFH house in a nice neighborhood and a proposal to plop a Section 8 high rise next door comes up. Much the same way that sanctuary cities are "pro sanctuary" until tens of thousands of "asylum seekers" show up. It turns out there there actually _are_ consequences to these progressive policies that _will_ impact your life negatively, and it's all fun and games until it's your turn. That's precisely why you see these seemingly contradictory policies that exist in ostensibly very progressive municipalities. People want the feel-good policies, they just don't want the negative consequences to affect them.
Re: Americans Voted Their Way into a Housing Crisis
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
> via capricious zoning policies designed specifically to make housing more expensive This coincides with treating housing as an investment. Older generations (even Gen X) will flaunt how great it is that their house went up by X% in the last 5 years. It completely ignores that housing is meant to keep a roof over your head and not be treated as a spreadsheet line item in your portfolio.
Ah yes, I left that out but it's amazing how people continue to want housing to be both "affordable" and "a good investment" when those are fundamentally antithetical goals. A good investment gets less affordable over time.
Maybe, but these are primarily antithetical when density doesn't increase.
It's totally possible to have housing be "affordable" (i.e., condos, apartments in multi-unit complexes) and "a good investment" -- buildable land close to amenities/jobs/etc. rises in value, and so selling to a developer who will add more units on that land can net the owner a solid profit.
The contradiction appears when you want the same units (i.e., SFHs in perpetuity) to be both affordable and appreciate in value.