A few years ago I was in Hong Kong. One of the many things that amazed me about that city was the prevalence of high rise apartment buildings. Buildings 50, 60, 70 stories high were commonplace there. Over here, even in fairly dense San Francisco, the very highest apartment buildings have around 50 floors, and there aren’t many. It made me realize that we could build a LOT denser housing if we wanted.
Or if we had to. Because Hong Kong has limited land area and pretty much had to build upwards.
The US still has lots of land, allowing sprawl in a way that other parts of the world just can’t do.
A national building code is not going to happen in the U.S., even if it were constitutional. But some states are overriding local zoning laws to permit multi-unit housing. I forget all the details, but California state law permits multi-unit housing within a certain distance of a passenger rail stop, despite any local zoning. We need a lot more high-density zoning, plus investments in high-density urban areas.
While NIMBYism is strangling our cities through lack of high-density development, the other side of it is that too many people have too much of their wealth tied up in their property. This is a blind spot for some on the political left. Lack of high-density development increases the cost of housing, cost of travel, cost of environmental protections. Wealth tied to property ties people to a location and reduces their ability to take their labor elsewhere. Labor needs to be as mobile as capital for it to be closer in parity in power (which is also why easier immigration is important).
This can only be fixed by progressive wealth redistribution–for example, a wealth tax on property beyond a first home. Corporate-owned properties should always be taxed at a high rate (this is where California’s Prop 13 desperately needs amended).
I feel rent controls are bad policy because they disincentivize investment by landlords. Better to tax their wealth and income directly. Similarly, I feel that rent subsidies are bad policy, because it’s a straight pass-through to landlords. Better to have a universal basic income, independent of housing.
Except it is not economically beneficial to them in terms of tax base even if it would make the city more livable. In general, ‘urban planning’ and revitalization in the United States has come to mean high volume roads, big parking allotments, and the occasional park or public artwork, and because none of this provies direct revenue they have to maximize assessed real estate value.
You are correct that it doesn’t, but since zoning isn’t really an issue of interstate commerce or enumerated in other Federal powers, it defaults to states, and thence mostly to municipalities and counties. And honestly, it should because this is an issue that is very much one of local needs and considerations, and also when the federal government has gotten directly involved in housing it has resulted in failed projects and systemic racism. However, there are so many entrenched interests along with individual owners who want to maintain the status quo that making effective changes—even obviously beneficial ones like improving energy efficiency and just permitting Passivehaus and multi-unit family housing construction—is like pulling alligator teeth.
I could write an epic screed about the awfulness of HOAs and condo associations. They exist for ostensible good reasons but they often end up being run by the absolutely worst people with the shadiest and most self-serving motivations.
Super-high density, high rise housing is neither cost nor resource efficient, and is about the least sustainable form of construction notwithstanding what happens when an area becomes less appealing and you end up with massive buildings that are mostly unoccupied and difficult to repurpose or convert to a different grade of housing. Housing design and urban planning should account for flexibility to accommodate changes in demographics, and specifically an aging population with much smaller family sizes in the foreseeable future.
Hong Kong builds up because they don’t have room to build out; the United States doesn’t have that problem anywhere outside of the island of Manhattan. What does make sense is medium density, mixed use housing that encourages one (or none) car households by offering transportation options such as protected walking and bike trails, convenient trolley and light rail service, the ability to live relatively close to occupational and educational options, et cetera. Of course, the US decided to build out into suburbs specifically to distribute the population to be resilient to nuclear attack even though that was pretty much obviated by the development of ICBM vehicles, and yet we’re stuck with an archaic and terribly wasteful system that is compounded by perverse incentives to make new housing as expensive as the market will bear.
Stranger
Then they’re guilty of short term thinking. In the long term, most American cities would be nuts not to shoot for the kind of tax revenue received by the likes of Tokyo. Dense populations in wealthy countries produce extraordinary wealth, and extraordinary taxes.
But lately some American cities are already trying. We’ll see if it will work – I have high hopes.
Welcome to municipal government. And frankly, for the vast majority of cities, they are not going to see anything like the growth experienced by Tokyo in the ‘Eighties and ‘Nineties. In fact, despite continued movement from rural to urban, and (hopefully) migration influx into the US, many larger cities can expect some degree of contraction in coming decades because of demographic trends and effects of climate change. Even where expansion will occur (mostly mid-sized cities in the Central Midwest and Great Lakes region) the costs associated with restructuring for high density are prohibitive, and just because they have high density housing doesn’t mean they are going to attract massive numbers of people to occupy it.
Stranger
The housing crisis is very much like the climate change crisis. The large effect is the result of thousands of individual local decisions over decades that get conflated into a single phrase that becomes almost meaningless because no solution other than thousands of decisions over decades is possible.
Housing always lags population shifts. Housing “crises” only happen in two circumstances: when housing is artificially limited over time, as happened during the Depression and WWII, or if people unexpectedly want to move to a new and unprepared area, as in gold rushed and oil strikes. The housing boom after WWII was a combination of both. Families moved from cities to the suburbs as soon as housing was available, and then moved from Rust Belt cities to the South and West as jobs beckoned creating opportunities to make money developing more suburbs.
Most of the 1950s housing was “affordable” in the sense that it was designed to be bare-minimum housing at the lowest prices aimed at a new middle class. We mostly remember the individual-owned family housing that resulted, but enormous numbers of rental properties also were erected. Every city had rental developments where newly-married couples gathered before buying a starter home, which they then either put additions onto or else moved into larger housing as children were added. This was a sensible pathway. It had the enormous flaw of being restricted to whites but the nation as a whole mostly ignored that since non-whites were a small percentage of the home-buying market.
This pattern broke in a number of ways. Instead an even distribution of population growth around the country, growth became concentrated in the Sun Belt, almost entirely in cities with no tradition of urban living. The apartment blocks that had housed the majority of the population in the early 20th century were not replaced. Suburbs sealed themselves off from what they saw as the lower classes with zoning laws that prevented any building except for large homes on large acreage.
As mentioned above, housing prices correlate with the attractiveness of land. Central cities lost their allure and also the jobs they created. They separated into enclaves of the very rich surrounded by the poor. Detroit is just the extreme example of Rust Belt cities filled with ludicrously low-priced homes that can’t be sold, along with huge areas of emptiness as unwanted homes deteriorated. New buildings thrive, but only in the wealthy or gentrifying districts.
Suburban metro areas sprawled over thousands of square miles. That’s where the jobs were, though, and so the incoming buyers competed for land even at absurd commuting lengths. That both drove up the costs of individual homes and gave building them a higher RoI than rental properties with no downstream costs. The soaring house prices led to incredible numbers of people believing that housing prices would always soar, so flipping homes short-term was more sensible than living in a house and letting it build equity.
The U.S. will never have a federal housing authority and it wouldn’t make much sense to apply one to both Detroit and Phoenix. Yet subsidizing affordable housing is one of the very few answers to a crisis arising from encouraging artificial barriers to the market and allowing the market to freely scam people trying to engage fairly in it. Encouraging job growth in areas other than the Sun Belt would spread the buyers out into more areas, thereby lowering competition. Reviving cities would provide incentives to build rental properties for younger workers. All of these would change the supply/demand curve and allow prices to sink without harming anyone other than the redliners and flippers and NIMBYites.
Doing so would mean stepping outside of the lines of the “free market.” But the “free market” hasn’t existed in the lifetimes of most people trying to buy houses, if ever. Not adhering to an imaginary value that is twisted to benefit only a small slice of the population is a positive rather than a negative.
Keep in mind that an increase in supply will reduce the cost-which will make those investment homes unprofitable which will increase the supply which will reduce the cost…
Careful what we wish for. 10 of millions of voters are please with the high value of their homes. Taking that away from them won’t be popular.
Upzoning can increase the value of property while reducing individual housing costs. My own community is in the process of upzoning - I own a single family house, in sfh only zoning… If it’s upzoned (which seems likely in the next few years), suddenly this single family plot could have a 4 or 6 unit apartment building on it. Which is more valuable, one single family home or 6 apartments? So in this case the opportunity to build more housing would probably increase the value of my own property.
The proximity of apartments and multifamily homes tends to reduce the market value of nearby homes, and that ultimately drives reductions in assessed value even though multifamily buildings have a higher overall value per square foot (and are often assessed on a different basis that makes them more expensive anyway). Setting aside the handful of US cities with geographic constraints and high population density—essentially, New York, San Francisco, Seattle, Boston, and….Philadelphia?…there just really isn’t a land constraint driving a need for high density housing writ large. Most cities just sprawl outward and people do the commute in order to afford a large house and/or yard without consideration for how wasteful it is. The people who can’t afford housing in cities generally can’t afford it in the ‘burbs, either, because we just don’t build for lower middle class anymore, and again, the inflation in rental prices is being driven by predatory consolidation.
Multifamily dwellings, particularly in mixed use settings have other advantages but the lack of them isn’t what is fundamentally driving housing cost and scarcity. And frankly, except for Tokyo/Yokohama and Osaka, the same is true for Japan; people do tend to live in denser housing because that is what was available post-WWII but there is plenty of affordable housing in the second tier cities, and the government will literally pay you to move to the outlying towns, which is a great deal if you don’t mind a complete lack of nightlife or entertainment. In twenty to thirty years, pretty much all of Japan outside of the Tokyo core will have a large housing surplus akin to what we are seeing right now in China, and if we elected to build large amounts of high density housing in a misguided attempt to address supposed scarcity, we’d be in the same boat (albeit on a somewhat longer timeframe).
Stranger
Rather than try to pack more people into a small area while large cities throughout the country have plenty of available real estate, how about working to help population relocate if they can’t afford to live in a certain place? No one has a right to live in San Fransisco if they can’t afford it. And it seems crazy to try to cram more people into some of the most expensive real estate on the continent when there is plenty available at reasonable prices elsewhere.
Also, you have to recognize that one of the reasons you have so much homelessness is that you subsidize it. People in tents are avoiding property raxes, fees, regulations, etc. They are allowed to skirt the law with impugnity. In a place like San Fransisco that’s a hell of a lot of subsidy compared to a homeowner.
Also, it’s not just a housing issue, as a lot of homeless people are addicts or mentally ill, and simply can’t manage proper housing for reasons other than just money.
It seems that a few big cities have hit on a novel way to address the problem: Instead of solving the supply issues they are going after demand by simply governing so badly that they are chasing people out of their cities. San Fransisco has lost 55,000 people since 2020,and now has the lowest population it’s had in a decade. That will accelerate due to tech layoffs. Portland lost 1.7% of its population between 2020 and 2021. This week we learned that all Wal-Mart stores are leaving the city due to safety concerns and shoplifting losses. Walgreens is already gone. Detroit, already a fraction of its peak size, lost another 5% of its population beween 2010 and 2020.
Keep electing lunatic DAs that put criminals back on the streets, and keep encouraging lawlessness and homelessness, and make shoplifting below $950 a misdemeanor that isn’t prosecuted, and home prices will be affordable eventually. Ask the survivors of living in inner city Detroit or Baltimore. You can get real cheap houses there.
It sounds grand to simply relocate people but one reason the big cities are so concentrated is because that’s where there are jobs… but many of those jobs don’t pay a sufficient wage that the worker can afford housing in the area.
Back when I still worked in corporate America and commuted to work in Chicago’s Loop one of the VP’s of the company lamented that he could no longer find a secretary that lived close to the office and who could come in early or stay late when he felt it was needed. The man couldn’t wrap his head around the concept that no secretary administrative assistant was being paid enough to be able to afford even a studio apartment in the Loop/Gold Coast. All of us admins were living at least 40-50 miles away, and half of us across the state line just so we can afford adequate housing/utilities/food/etc. on our wages. Keep in mind my wages were generous enough I could fly airplanes as a hobby, yet I could not have afford even a small apartment or condominium in the Loop.
Also, a lot of homeless people AREN’T addicts or mentally ill, but they’re harder to spot because they don’t “look homeless”. People couch-surfing or living out of vans are also homeless. Working in retail, even in an area with a relatively low cost of living for its proximity to a big city, has been a revelation as to just how many of my co-workers who show up to work clean and presentable actually have no home to go to, who sleep in their cars in the parking lot or crash at relatives’ houses when they can or save their pennies for an occasional night in a cheap hotel room. If it’s that bad here, I shudder to think what it’s like in San Francisco.
When working full time can’t get you enough to buy shelter that’s a serious, serious social problem.
Prosecuting shoplifting isn’t free. Doing so below a certain dollar amount isn’t cost effective, however galling the notion might be.
But there still remains the problem that cities need workers for certain jobs that aren’t highly valued even if they are needed, resulting in people earning less than needed to get housing in said cities. Relocating people to less densely populated areas that don’t have enough jobs for all those people isn’t anything than a very brief solution that will then result in even more unemployed people in those areas who will eventually be homeless again. And big cities will still have a need for baristas and gas station staff and restaurant waitstaff and janitors and all those other people the upper class look down their nose at.
Moderator Note
While these are topics worthy of discussion, they are getting off-topic for this particular thread. The affordable housing crisis generally doesn’t refer to people who are homeless and jobless because of mental issues or the like, but rather refers to those who work and would gladly buy a house if they could afford it. The issue of the homeless who can’t or won’t work is best suited to another thread.
Urban decay and the politics of whether or not to prosecute things like shoplifting is also a completely different topic. Feel free to discuss these, just not in this thread.
The problem is that these local needs and considerations are myopic, they consider only the local needs, and ignore the macroeconomic effect of every local municipality making the same myopic decisions.
IMHO, I blame NIMBYs and people who think that they’re entitled to the character of their municipality at the time they bought in. I’m amazed at how many self-proclaimed capitalists think that it’s OK to tell landowners they can’t build condos.
I’m near Boston, and the same fight is raging in most of the close suburbs. Someone wants to put up a 100 unit condo (or even a 15 unit condo) and everyone freaks the fuck out. Melrose is a single-family community! Dedham schools can’t handle the influx of kids living in condos that “only” cost $450k! Wakefield can’t absorb the traffic!
Many of those quotes are from family and friends of mine. I like to remind them that when their house was built, the other farmers were saying the very same thing.
ETA: If it isn’t clear, I do believe that market solutions are the best path forward.
Most of Asia learned a long time ago – don’t let non-citizens buy real estate. Rich non-Americans who can’t put their money anywhere else, can still buy US property and just let it sit.
I don’t disagree but the problem with top down approaches is that they are invariably a ‘one size fits none’ solution that is literally worse than the problem it tried to solve. Realistically, a combination of regulation, financial incentives, and updating building codes at the state and local level through some kind of national level technical and economic guidance to encourage mixed income/mixed use/sustainable housing is the complicated but effective answer to this problem. Just throwing up publicly funded high density housing is a solution that has been tried and failed spectacularly in most cases, and is really just going to result in abandoned housing that has to be torn down at great expense.
Stranger
And the people who live in San Francisco have no right to teachers, janitors, cashiers, fast food workers, or any of the other professions that are typically looked down on until they are needed.
This is the problem with the “well, they can go elsewhere” argument. Some of these cities are massive economic engines, and require workers at all levels.
I agree that nobody has the right to demand to live in a particular neighborhood. I run into that a lot. “I grew up in this town and it’s not right I can’t afford a house here” doesn’t garner a lot of sympathy when that person CAN afford a house in the next town over. But that said, there needs to be a place for those workers in the greater San Fran (or Boston, etc) area.
It’s a problem in both directions, though.
I don’t want somebody in Washington DC deciding that our productive farmlands aren’t worth protecting because they’re not among the three soil categories considered, nationally, to be the best for farming. (We can protect them and still allow for housing. That’s one of the things cluster development ordinances can be used for.)
And we have enough trouble with New York State screwing up local traffic patterns that were highly functional in an attempt to force them into their idea of a proper grid pattern. We really don’t need Washington doing it also – and applying it to all the local roads, on top of that; NYSDOT only deals with state roads.
Localities can make stupid decisions, sure. National authorities can also make stupid decisions.
Now a national law saying that localities must provide in their zoning for at least x% affordable housing – ideally with money to subsidize as necessary – but leaving the details to the localities: that might make sense. So does subsidizing walkable communities and public transport, which also makes housing more affordable if it’s done well enough to make the expense of keeping a car, or more than one car, optional. Public transport always needs to be subsidized, one way or another – as do roads and bridges even if used only by private vehicles.