Profiling the "Abundance" housing bottleneck with real data

However, the popularity of cars, highways, and general mobility all over the place, has caused many bishops, particularly in the United States, to sort of supersede these territorial rules. Now in my diocese, a Catholic can go attend any parish they want to, and register in that parish, and for all legal purposes they are an official member of that parish, as if they lived within the territory. There have always been parishes like this, called "personal parishes" but they were often defined by certain ethnolinguistic qualities, like everyone from Poland, or Vietnam or something.

So now this leads to some crazy situations. For example, my friend was received into the Church from Lutheranism, and when this happened, he lived in a particular place. But he's moved away--far, far away--twice, and yet he still "commutes" to that parish where he became attached and still loves, and still has commitments and responsibilities there, which he upholds.

There are also people who, for liturgical or doctrinal reasons, will drive for hours on Sundays just to reach a church that agrees with their personal beliefs and preferences.

I am not sure this is sustainable or realistic. If eventually you have Catholics driving all over creation, literally, to get to their preferred parish, then some parishes are going to languish, if they cannot attract or retain people who are willing to volunteer there, support their material needs, and send their kids to the parochial school. That means schools are going to close. There are also independent schools popping up, that are not parochial, but approved, and Catholics send their kids there. Failing that, they get homeschooled.

I think this extreme mobility thing is absurd. I can't keep up, obviously, having no vehicle. It was actually easier for me to commute to a parish I didn't "territorially" belong to because of the way public transit works, but eventually I decided to stop commuting, and be honest, and live up to responsibilities of the parish where I belong, territorially, even if that is now a de jure thing of the past.

More like a straw army.

Austin is surrounded by empty flat land. San Francisco is surrounded by water and was built out many decades ago.

London suffers from being the main city in Britain. The UK is overcentralized. Most of the money and power are in London. Some countries are centralized like that, with all the good stuff around the national capital. France, Japan, and Russia are; the US, Canada, and China are not. (China, maybe; too much is near Beijing, but there are lots of other big cities.)

There’s also a failure to see second or third order effects. Yes, up zoning means that new homes will be expensive at first, but over time prices fall as demand and supply reach equilibrium. Similarly rent control is a feel good policy to screw the young and newcomers in favour of incumbent renters.

That's true if we're talking residential structures using load bearing masonry in America. Modern timber-framed houses? Nope.

> It’s not something you can just throw tons of money at and pops up over night.

If this is true for your locale, the reasoning always boils down to the slow pace of bureaucracy. Needing this permit cleared, then this one, need this plan signed off on, need this approved, etc. Of course, you can absolutely expedite the process by throwing money at the problem. The wealthy do that in LA all the time, to shorten a 5-year bureaucratic lead time into a matter of months. Sometimes it's to build where local regulation would outright forbid it, rather than expedite the process.

The thing is that this bureaucratic lead-time is entirely manufactured. It's not actually a natural law. The state can bypass it anytime it pleases and and pass the buck to pick up the mess. The obvious contemporary example is just how quickly data centers have been built, but it's a truism in general. Never underestimate the power of the state deciding to ignore its own laws, and its natural god-given right to do so at any time.