The reality is that we do not have a free market, and will not. We used to, but the result was truly awful slums and dangerous housing. Building codes exist because it’s not in society’s interest to have people dying in house fires, or even non-lethal house fires than can spread and damage other structures. Not to mention the problems of unregulated sewage and so forth.
We also do not have a free market so long as we have a tax code that gives any sort of break to property owners, be that a mortgage deduction or whatever might be available.
So, sorry libertarians, “free market” isn’t going to be the answer. We can discuss reasonable restrictions on the market, and whether or not the market is over-regulated or under-regulated in specific markets, but an actual free market has been off the table since the Gilded Age.
Yes, more supply is the answer. This is how Tokyo does it:
It’s not quite as simple as just build more, but in general this is a supply problem, and the way to alleviate supply problems is to increase the supply.
Green space is often also absorbing excess water during heavy rain, which reduces both flooding and drought and helps keep water supplies clean; and increasing air quality; and even increasing species survivall (yes, even in urban areas.)
Where it should be needs to be properly planned, of course; and if it’s all in compacted heavily chemicaled single-species mowed lawn, then it isn’t doing much of any of that.
But often there are areas housing could be built on without sprawling it all over the “green space”; and properly managed green space isn’t only benefiting the people living right next to it.
Properly designed cluster development ordinances, along with allowing more multi-unit housing where the septic and water systems are (or can be gotten) up to it, can help a good deal with this. It’s not so much a matter of removing zoning regulations as of re-designing them, IMO. But the people who are doing the re-designing need to be doing so with an intention to genuinely encourage affordable housing, not with an intention to keep the “riff-raff” out.
I mean, sure, we all want affordable & available housing. And not just affordable, but good quality. And low/reasonable taxes. And lots of green space. And low permit fees. In trendy, low-crime areas with good schools, good transportation, high-paying jobs, beautiful landscapes, and nice weather. Beaches would be a nice touch, too.
But no matter how hard you try, you can’t have all of that. Because it doesn’t exist. You need to pick-n-choose what you want, and the expense of the others.
In the United States, local housing markets are plagued by grassroots “Not In My Back Yard” (NIMBY) activists who organize to stop efforts to build town homes and apartment buildings in their local neighborhoods. Because every construction project is located near somebody, the result tends to be that little housing gets built anywhere.
In contrast, Harding writes, Japan sets housing regulations at the national level. As a result, if a Tokyo landowner wants to knock down his single-family home and replace it with a six-unit condo building, there’s little that his neighbors can do to stop it. That can be annoying to individual homeowners, of course. But it also has the huge upside of keeping housing costs under control.
This is certainly a factor where I live. We have lots of downtown-ish neighborhoods that could flourish if we were to build in-fill housing to replace some older single-family homes. But our zoning laws restrict a huge part of the city’s land area to only single-family homes, and where zoning allows such in-fill, there are neighbors who fight tooth and nail to prevent new developments.
We have one local councilor who is notorious for advocating for more in-fill housing, in every area of the city but his own district. When it comes to that, he backs every single NIMBY complaint his neighborhood puts out.
This is an issue where libertarians and left of center opinion makers (as per the OP) can agree on the direction of the solution. The supply of housing has not kept up with the demand for housing.
The restriction on supply is not a result of safety codes and sewage, it’s a result of local zoning and allowed usage telling landowners that even if they own a parcel of land, and there is a market for housing built on that land, the other people in town get to decide whether or not that land will be built on.
The complaints are about school costs and traffic and expanding the sewer, and where do I park my car? Extremely local concerns that scream NIMBY, but when every town NIMBYs the same type of projects, it’s hard to get housing supply to increase.
Paul Krugman, who I trust with these sorts of things, thinks that NIMBY is a big part of the housing shortage. People don’t want big apartment buildings going up near them. In cities (like some in Texas) where zoning laws are much looser than NYC or SF, the housing problems are much less severe.
Or, as iiandyiiii (who I also trust on these things) said:
The “free market” is “do[ing] its thing” and is causing this issue. This is not a supply-side issue; it is in large measure both forced scarcity (by corporations buying up rental properties and ramping lease costs and holding unoccupied properties) combined with perverse incentives to build toward the luxury end of the new housing construction market, such that houses that are available are out of reach for anyone who is not in the upper-middle class income bracket.
Mass construction of more high priced suburban housing and construction over greenspaces isn’t the answer; nor are public housing ‘projects’ and other direct public funding schemes. The real answers are somewhere around regulating banks and builders to finance and construct a certain amount of lower cost housing (preferably mixed use and mixed income housing), putting cost and ownership controls in place to prevent large corporations from owning vast swaths of rental property and essentially establishing a monopoly or cartel where they can raise rents without limit, and offering housing assistance or rebates in areas where gentrification is occurring to allow existing residents on fixed or limited incomes to afford housing in the same area instead of being forced to move to a much cheaper area or forced into homelessness.
Because in the United States zoning ordnances are under the control of municipal and county governments that are focused on maximizing tax revenue and appraised value of properties, and short of a Constitutional amendment they aren’t going to capitulate to national control or agree to schemes that may reduce the assessed value of real estate.
The Constitution does not say that zoning has to be done at the municipal level. Any change that eliminates the hyper local control over construction will greatly expand the opportunity for supply growth.
In my town, there’s a huge space that has been vacant since A&P went bankrupt 7 years ago. There have been no less than 4 concepts for buildout floated with up to 500+ apartments 20% affordable housing and retail being proposed. It’s still vacant, nothing has been agreed to, it’s just plan after plan getting floated and shot down by the locals.
If this was New Jersey handling the whole thing, with an eye towards eliminating NIMBYism, it wouldn’t matter if this guy was building in my town, the next town over, Newark, Hoboken or Camden, the rules are the same, and locals won’t get the chance to say “but what about traffic on MY street?” to the people who have the power to deny the permit.
The problem is the pushback from people who are already property owners who want to maximize their asset without any regard for the greater well-being of everyone in the area. This is particularly acute with those who have essentially sunk all of their wealth and investment into their house and have no other resources or recourse.
That’s one thing my city has done well with in at least 2 cases, and maybe a third soon. We have several older malls, that are partially strip-malls, and partially enclosed malls (they’re really weird hybrids, mostly 70s era constructions). They’re relatively small, as well, compared to the malls from the 80s heyday of mall construction. What they’re doing now is taking over a chunk of the parking lot, and building apartment or condo buildings on them. Brings in a few hundred new residents who are now just seconds away from half-decent shopping, and since the malls were already designed with traffic in mind, the access to the site is still pretty good. This will likely re-vitalize these old malls, to the benefit of everyone else in the area, as well.
Of course, these are all in slightly run-down, lower-income areas, so the NIMBY types aren’t nearly as influential, which is probably why these projects got approved.
As I said, at least two are almost ready for occupancy, and there’s a proposal in the works for a third.
NIMBYism is a pejorative term. But often, NIMBYists are trying to protect something above and beyond their own self-interest. Consider, for example, struggles between commercial developers and conservationists.
There’s some of that, of course, but there’s also people just not wanting the “wrong people” moving in or not wanting to have to expand the school system, etc.
In many parts of the US, virtually nothing is being built that is NOT covenant-controlled.
Which does a couple of IMHO things;
Prioritizes the commodification of housing by ceding significant control to the HOAs that – really, really – sacrifice the traditional definitions of “neighborhood” and “community” for the somewhat nouveau “home price appreciation uber alles” ethos
Gives cities a double dip. Most homeowners in HOA are subject to the same property tax rates as those fortunate few who are NOT in HOAs, and yet the HOA takes on responsibility for significant portions of infrastructure maintenance traditionally handled by the municipality
This ties in, IMHO, with the market-skewing effect of institutional investors buying up an ever-increasing share of the housing stock.
