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One reason for the high cost of housing in California is overregulation

latimes.com

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Re: One reason for the high cost of housing in California is overregulation

#41

Post by jayd16 »

realityman wrote: post #14
jayd16 wrote: post #6

This might bite a little harder if you could look in any direction in Los Angeles and not see new construction. The current amount of space occupied by low density housing is something we could improve on but its just that. Occupied! Hopefully all this commercial space rezoned for multi-purpose use (shops on the ground floor, apartments or offices above) will free up some of the low density real-estate but its not ov…

The number of housing starts in Los Angeles right now is basically zero[1]. 30 years ago the pace of home building in LA was three times higher with a population 20% smaller. 1: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LOSA106BPPRIVSA

Makes sense. There was far more space then. When I was a kid the Hollywood hills looked very empty, now you see more housing than mountain. We're building up instead of out from now on and that's a lot harder.

Re: One reason for the high cost of housing in California is overregulation

#42

Post by shaki-dora »

voldacar wrote: post #30
wahern wrote: post #4

Using this database of regulation metadata, https://quantgov.org/state-regdata/ the articles starts out saying that the California Code of Regulations "contains more than 21 million words". Which made me curious: how many words for Texas' code? Answer: 15 million. $ grep '^[[:digit:]]' admincode_california_metadata.csv | cut -d, -f5 | tr '\n' '+' | (cat; printf "0\n") | bc 21172868 $ grep '^[[:digit:]]' admincode_tex…

I think the most important issue in modern governance that nobody ever talks about is the tendency for the number of laws and the size of the legal code to monotonically grow towards infinity

I think that's mostly just cynicism. If you actually chart document lengths, you are far more likely to see logarithmic growth or something asymptotically approaching a (finite) value.

More importantly: this is both to be expected and rather benign. It's expected because regulation simply grows with the complexity of society, which is increasing at a similar or even larger pace. Most of our wealth is due to specialisation and research. And with the benefits of, say, flying cars, comes the need to establish rules.

It's also benign because almost nothing of it will ever concern you, or any other specific individual. You can fly your car without knowing the crash test procedures for it. They are relevant only if you are building flying cars. In that case, you do have to familiarise yourself with the rules, but that is a task of the same magnitude as it was with existing regulation for (regular) cars, which no longer concern you.

Re: One reason for the high cost of housing in California is overregulation

#43

Post by leguminous »

The article references energy efficiency regulations specifically. Is the energy code in California significantly stricter than the IECC?

There are nice aspects of energy codes. For one thing, potential renters and buyers have little insight into how efficient a house or apartment really is. Since landlords and builders aren't paying the utility bills they are incentivized to reduce upfront construction costs at the cost of higher utility bills (and environmental damage) going forward.

If these codes are effective then they might be worth the increased construction costs. I'm not necessarily saying that they are (I don't know, maybe California's code is filled with frivolous, ineffective details; the article doesn't really give any examples) but I think just the fact that they increase upfront costs doesn't actually mean they aren't a good idea.

Re: One reason for the high cost of housing in California is overregulation

#44

Post by aidenn0 »

scarface74 wrote: post #28
bwb wrote: post #25

I am curious, would you be supportive of a federal law that takes over zoning if housing prices are more than x above the median income in that area? IE, take control away from NIMBAs?

Of course not. Why shouldn’t the people who live there be able to decide the character of their city? If the cost of living gets too high either people will move to lower cost of living and companies will follow or the opposite will happen. The United States is a big country with lots of land. Besides, the federal government is the least representative of people in larger cities. Your vote counts s lot more in rural…

OT, but Rhode Island is far more populous than many other states (double that of Wyoming, which is the least populous state); they have 2 house seats whereas there are 7 states with only 1. They are the least populous state with 2 house seats though, and some counts put Montana (1 house seat) as more populous.

Another fun fact: there are about 10 cities in the US with a higher population than Rhode Island, and San Jose, CA has a similar population to Rhode Island with one-eighth the land.

Re: One reason for the high cost of housing in California is overregulation

#45

Post by adamredwoods »

Here is one of the authors having a go at Washington State, although here in Seattle, we seemingly have a healthy construction market(footnote 1).

https://www.mercatus.org/publications/regulation/snapshot-wa...

My key take-away from these authors is this tidbit:

> Researchers at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University developed State RegData, a platform for analyzing and quantifying state regulatory text.

(1) More data:

Building permits by state, April 2019: https://www.nahb.org/en/research/housing-economics/construct...

Re: One reason for the high cost of housing in California is overregulation

#46

Post by scarface74 »

closeparen wrote: post #39
scarface74 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course not. Why shouldn’t the people who live there be able to decide the character of their city? If the cost of living gets too high either people will move to lower cost of living and companies will follow or the opposite will happen. The United States is a big country with lots of land. Besides, the federal government is the least representative of people in larger cities. Your vote counts s lot more in rural…

For deep and persistent reasons, a society’s highest-value economic activity and growth will tend to be in cities. The stakes are much higher than architectural taste, and decisions about access to those economies affect everyone. People getting locked out of an economy have a stronger claim to a seat at the table than people worried about shadows. An abundance of land suited to agriculture or resource extraction is…

Even if that’s the case, those cities don’t all have to be on the west coast. You could have more smaller “big cities”.

But with the imbalance of power where rural America’s vote is worth more per capita than big cities/big states, do you really want to give that power to the federal government?

There is nothing stopping tech companies from “rural sourcing” - opening smaller satellite offices in less populous areas. A benefit of that would be that the tech industry wouldn’t be so myopic.

Do you know how often people on HN wonder how could any software developer live off of only $120K-$150K?

Re: One reason for the high cost of housing in California is overregulation

#47

Post by malandrew »

true_tuna wrote: post #32
voldacar wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the most important issue in modern governance that nobody ever talks about is the tendency for the number of laws and the size of the legal code to monotonically grow towards infinity

I’ve heard of the idea of baking expiation into any given law. Useful laws get renewed, useless ones get expunged.

Idaho just completely reset all it's regulations.

https://fee.org/articles/idaho-repealed-its-entire-regulator...

Re: One reason for the high cost of housing in California is overregulation

#48

Post by scarface74 »

aidenn0 wrote: post #44
scarface74 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course not. Why shouldn’t the people who live there be able to decide the character of their city? If the cost of living gets too high either people will move to lower cost of living and companies will follow or the opposite will happen. The United States is a big country with lots of land. Besides, the federal government is the least representative of people in larger cities. Your vote counts s lot more in rural…

OT, but Rhode Island is far more populous than many other states (double that of Wyoming, which is the least populous state); they have 2 house seats whereas there are 7 states with only 1. They are the least populous state with 2 house seats though, and some counts put Montana (1 house seat) as more populous. Another fun fact: there are about 10 cities in the US with a higher population than Rhode Island, and San Jo…

Point taken, but they each have 2 senate seats and the Senate decides judges and cabinet members - the Senate has far more power than the House.

Re: One reason for the high cost of housing in California is overregulation

#49

Post by gumby »

It's interesting that they zoom in on the energy requirements as driving the $400K housing costs in LA. In the Central Valley developers put up completely code compliant houses for about $150/f2 -- about $250K-$300K. $150/f2 is really quite cheap by US standards. If the price in LA is more (which is understandable) this one factor can hardly be it.

Other factors they mention (single family requirements, lot size, density) have a lot more to do with it.

Re: One reason for the high cost of housing in California is overregulation

#50

Post by dragonwriter »

scarface74 wrote: post #46
closeparen wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For deep and persistent reasons, a society’s highest-value economic activity and growth will tend to be in cities. The stakes are much higher than architectural taste, and decisions about access to those economies affect everyone. People getting locked out of an economy have a stronger claim to a seat at the table than people worried about shadows. An abundance of land suited to agriculture or resource extraction is…

Even if that’s the case, those cities don’t all have to be on the west coast. You could have more smaller “big cities”. But with the imbalance of power where rural America’s vote is worth more per capita than big cities/big states, do you really want to give that power to the federal government? There is nothing stopping tech companies from “rural sourcing” - opening smaller satellite offices in less populous areas.…

> Even if that’s the case, those cities don’t all have to be on the west coast.

And they aren't.

I mean, New York City exists, for instance.

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