To answer the OP’s question: yes, of course building more housing (apartments, home, condos, etc) will solve the housing crisis.
Here’s the big problem: Homes represent a large % of the net worth of a significant and influential block of voters, and there is no mayor who will ever win election on the platform of “we need to lower your home’s value via a program of building so many homes that the market gets, well, a little over-saturated and prices start dropping to ‘reasonable’ levels.”
So the political pressure is to keep those home valuations high, and increasing housing stock by 30%, 50% over a few years just will not serve those ends.
I’ve got an idea; how about we just don’t tell them that? Market it as, “We need slums for your gardeners and fast food workers to live in, so you don’t have to do all that work yourself, or wait more than 30 seconds to get fed” instead. Then just don’t make them actual slums.
I would guess you haven’t closely examined real estate prices in California recently. If you needed to work in San Francisco, you’d have to drive – I’m guessing here – about 100 mlles to find housing a middle class family could reasonably afford. SF has about 700 thousand people – the greater Bay Area, almost 8 million, and there isn’t much of any affordable housing in it. This is a much greater problem than you are describing.
You’ve never visited a homeless camp either, have you? It’s the utmost in squalor and horribly exposed to any kind of crime and every weather. The people who live in such camps are mostly men with intractable addictions and untreated mental illness. Often both at once. The majority of the homeless are invisible, sleeping on the sofas and in the garages of friends and relatives, and in their cars. This is where all the homeless women and children are – and in the inadequate public shelters. Nobody is living it up on the taxpayer’s dime as you so self-righteously imagine.
It’s going to be really interesting to see if the new MBTA multifamily zoning requirement is going to have any teeth. That additional zoning is something that might simply be voted down at town meeting; also, I suppose there is some possibility of constitutional challenge.
None of these are easy problems, but there are places on Earth where they’ve been largely solved (i.e. Tokyo). We should take our cues from those places.
The problem here is not stupid decisions, it’s decisions focused only on the immediate desires of the locals. The decisions defend everybody’s current situation, but nobody is advocating for the needs of the people who would be helped by additional development.
My issue is the cookie cutter complaints {town name} can’t handle more development. {town name} schools are overcrowded. {town name} roads have too much traffic. {town name} water and sewer can’t handle more people. {town name}'s character will be lost. It doesn’t matter if {town name} is a crowded suburb or a sparsely populated rural area, whether it’s populated with Liberals or Conservatives.
It’s ultimately an “I’ve got mine” argument. I have the house I want in the town I want, and I want it to stay that way forever.
I think it was Dennis Miller who once said, “A developer is someone who wants to build a house in a forest; a conservationist is someone who already owns a house in the forest.”
If there’s an unsaturated market for the luxury units then a builder would be stupid not to cater to that market. After the top end of the market is satisfied development starts moving down the ladder.
Surface runoff and need for retention areas are a product more of pavement than buildings. The per-capita runoff of urban cities is less than suburban areas because suburban areas spawn so much more roads and parking lots which need more buffer areas which makes walking and cycling less attractive, and it spins out of control.
Also parking requirements tend to strangle downtown revitalization efforts. Fortunately towns are starting to figure this out and are revamping their downtown zoning regs to be more flexible in that regard.
Without proper tax structures it can also lead to speculation and stalling the redevelopment. That’s how you end up with tiny single-family shacks next to 6-story apartment blocks. Because the land itself is such a small part of the property tax assessment, there’s a disincentive to developing it and incentive to hold it vacant (downtown surface parking lots for example) in hopes of a big windfall. Region-wide or statewide upzoning (which is really just preventing the downzoning that’s currently de rigueur) would help prevent that by not concentrating all the redevelopment potential in a small area.
One might assume that if you were willing to move to one of California’s most remote and least sought-after areas (such as Bakersfield), you’d readily find housing that was – by national standards – affordable. And yet… that’s just not the case! You still end up paying a shocking premium to live in any part of California.
Great, but where are the jobs? Between 2011 and 2017 The SF Bay Area “created 531,400 new jobs but only permitted 123,801 new housing units: This adds up to a ratio of 4.3 jobs per housing unit, a rate well in excess of a healthy balance of 1.5 jobs per housing unit.”
So after the rich people have all the houses they want (and rich people often have multiple houses), then maybe the people who clean those houses can get one? They’ll probably be after the ones who do the actual physical work of the building, of course; and long after the ones who own the companies doing the building.
And that’s presuming most of the developers don’t, instead, look for someplace to build where the rich people don’t think they have enough houses yet.
The per-capita runoff may be less, but the local impact can still be large, if urban areas don’t provide for absorptive areas within and adjacent to the city as well as far away from it.
Both the air quality and the summer overheating of urban areas can both also be drastically affected by a lack of properly planted green space.
The impact of pavement around houses in more suburban and rural areas can be lessened by proper design, such as cluster development; and by requiring absorbtive areas to be provided.
Some urban areas and many suburban and rural areas do indeed have places highly suitable for infill with houses on smaller lots and/or with multifamily housing and/or with multistory multifamily housing. But just ‘let’s fill in all this green space, it’s only there to look pretty’ is not the way to do it.
And yet people are simultaneously told that they ought to be ready to move wherever the jobs are.
(And, as has been pointed out elsewhere in this thread, the high-priced areas rely for their functioning on large numbers of people showing up to work there who aren’t paid enough to live there, or within any reasonable commuting distance.)
Rich people can already get any houses they want. If there is any part of the real estate development market that is just fine right now, it’s building big fancy houses. Nobody is doing new builds for starter homes, if you manage to lock down an empty lot that is zoned for a house, you build a big ass house on it.
Anyone who isn’t rich but wants a house is getting a 60 year old split level, if they can find one a developer doesn’t already want to knock down to build a McMansion.
The problem we’re having is that no, development has not been “moving down the ladder”. Whether it ever will, I have no idea; but, in the meantime, people are homeless.
The first being that then you don’t have enough employees in SF.
The second being, if they go somewhere else where there is high demand for employees, then the demand for housing is likely to be high as well.
And it’s not just SF. I live in suburbia, 20 miles from the nearest city, and houses around here are ridiculous. I bought mine 20 years ago, so I’ve got a nice low locked in mortgage that is about a third to a quarter of what people are paying to rent. I have employees that make 70k a year that can barely get qualified for a mortgage.
You could buy up a farm and turn it into hundreds or even thousands of housing units, but if there aren’t jobs nearby, why would anyone want to live there?
