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> Western governments have just become NIMBY-entrenched. The whole culture and bureaucracy is designed to make building things expensive, painful, and time-cons

> Western governments have just become NIMBY-entrenched. The whole culture and bureaucracy is designed to make building things expensive, painful, and time-consuming, and then we look around and wonder why we can't seem to build enough housing. Time and time again, companies have shown they will cut corners to make money. Much regulation exists to prevent people from being injured or killed, or for other legitimate reasons. Let's at least start by acknowledging that. (Of course petty bureaucrats and regulation do exist.) > The various regulations were mostly well intentioned, but we've obviously gone too far. How is this obvious? By the fact there is not enough housing where people want to live, and too much housing in other less desirable places? In the Western world in general? In Canada? In the US? In specific areas of the US/Canada? > If private companies are unable to provide more of a product even when demand is obvious and prices are high, something is very wrong. Unable... or unwilling? There's a difference between affordable housing and available housing. And ways to fix that other than flooding the market with so much housing to force an overabundance. That's kind of wasteful, too. For example, allowing developers to pay a one-time fine if they don't provide any affordable options in a new huge apartment block is probably a poor strategy. I'm all for making things better. The "too much regulation" thing is just a bit too facile of an argument. In the US at least, there usually exist places where there is less regulation. Weirdly, people don't automatically move there.

rangestransform 2y ago
> And ways to fix that other than flooding the market with so much housing to force an overabundance. That's kind of wasteful, too. Why? People need to move, and a certain amount of transiently vacant units is necessary for migration to not disrupt local prices too much.
- guitarbill 2y ago
  Sure, absolutely. But we've also seen that landlords/owners are sometimes happy to keep units vacant. Or just use RealPage. How many vacant units are required? And where? For what it's worth, I agree housing is nutty. But few desirable places have solved it. Not in the US, not in Canada, not in Europe. The "just build more" argument seems a bit simplistic. In an ideal world, it works. But we also wouldn't have villages dying in the country-side, and extremely expensive cities/metro-areas.
  - TulliusCicero 2y ago
    > How many vacant units are required? 7% vacancy rate is about the historical average for the US I think. Around there or a bit higher would probably be healthy. > And where? Supply needs to meet demand: we most need new housing where the economy is booming and jobs are being added. But you act like we need some federal authority to say, "okay guys, put housing HERE". That's totally unnecessary: if regulations are streamlined sufficiently, developers will build where demand exists. No central authority required. > But we also wouldn't have villages dying in the country-side, and extremely expensive cities/metro-areas. ??? I'm sorry, are you unaware that most jobs aren't remote or something? This is a very strange and simple thing to misunderstand.
    - guitarbill 2y ago
      > Supply needs to meet demand: we most need new housing where the economy is booming and jobs are being added. > But you act like we need some federal authority to say, "okay guys, put housing HERE". That's totally unnecessary: if regulations are streamlined sufficiently, developers will build where demand exists. No central authority required. Relax. I said no such thing. >> But we also wouldn't have villages dying in the country-side, and extremely expensive cities/metro-areas. > ??? > I'm sorry, are you unaware that most jobs aren't remote or something? This is a very strange and simple thing to misunderstand. I'm just going to quote this for posterity, noting that you cut off "In an ideal world, it works." on purpose. Let's keep things civil, and not try to misrepresent.
      - TulliusCicero 2y ago
        I'm not misrepresenting anything. That you're apparently confused as to why rural villages are dying while major cities are very expensive is just baffling. It's not even really related to it being hard to build, since even if it was easy and there was abundant housing, you'd still expect major cities to be at least somewhat more expensive than rural villages, and it being hard to build housing somewhere isn't why the rural villages are dying. > Relax. I said no such thing. Then what was the point of asking "and where?" Especially since "where demand is high" was already explained. What further answer were you looking for?
TulliusCicero 2y ago
> Time and time again, companies have shown they will cut corners to make money. Building codes that keep buildings safe and lovable are almost never the type of regulation that's a problem here. You'll virtually never find the dispute to be centered around a developer that wants to make a new building that's just kinda shitty and/or unsafe. Rather, the problems tend to be: * Livability concerns from neighbors around parking, views, shadows, traffic, "neighborhood character" (read: keep out them poors). * Environmental reviews, and especially people from the above group using fake environmental concerns to shut down or stall projects that they have a livability problem with. * Overall process just taking a really long time. San Francisco, for example, has basically been chided by the state government repeatedly for taking too long to process new building permits. There's an implicit strawman in your argument, because almost nobody is arguing against basic building codes around safety, or saying we should get rid of zoning that keeps factories or away from schools or whatever. The problem is that initially well intentioned regulations went overboard and have strangled development that we actually want. Imagine if farmers had to attend neighborhood meetings from "concerned individuals" and alleviate their concerns (with attendant delays) every time they planted new crops. That's kind of the situation housing development is in. > How is this obvious? It's obvious at both a macro and micro level. At a macro level, you can just looking at housing prices nationwide, or look at how in a given metro area with a booming economy, housing stock only crawls upwards, despite obvious demand. At a micro level, if you zoom in on an area, you'll quickly discover the issues I've talked about. Zoning makes much potential housing illegal or more expensive to build, and the processes make it much more difficult and more expensive and time consuming. California has a legislative analyst office that's produced various reports about this IIRC, because coastal California has had such an awful housing crisis for so long: https://lao.ca.gov/laoecontax/housing https://lao.ca.gov/laoecontax/housing > A lack of home building, particularly in coastal urban areas, is the fundamental cause of California’s housing crisis. Many factors contribute to this lack of building, chief among them local community resistance to new housing. The high cost and limited availability of housing in California forces many households to make serious tradeoffs in order to live here. > ... > Housing element law requires cities and counties to develop a plan that demonstrates how their planning and zoning rules will accommodate future home building. Our review of available evidence suggests that housing elements fall well short of their goal. Communities’ zoning rules often are out of sync with the types of projects developers desire to build and households desire to live in. There are no easy solutions to this problem. Any major changes in how communities plan for housing will require their active participation and a shift in how local residents view new housing. They've done some great work here, and statewide there's been some progress on the state forcing local governments to stop being such enormous shitheads, standing in the way of new housing. But it's an uphill battle, because of all the cultural momentum against serious new development. > Unable... or unwilling? Unable. Obviously not 100% unable, there's some new housing each year, it's just not enough. And the fact that even local government themselves are uninterested in even trying themselves kind of gives it away. Even the people setting the rules don't want to play the game, they know exactly how painful they've made it. I'm a bay area native so this topic is near and dear to my heart. Bay Area is basically NIMBY central for the whole country, but you can find similar issues almost everywhere, albeit not quite as extreme.
TulliusCicero 2y ago
> And ways to fix that other than flooding the market with so much housing to force an overabundance. "Too much housing"? What does that even mean? Having a lot of housing is good, it means lower prices, and tenants have more power than landlords. Plus, realistically, developers will stop building if there's a total flood, since a flood will lower prices and thus profits. > In the US at least, there usually exist places where there is less regulation. Weirdly, people don't automatically move there. Okay, two things: 1. There's actually very few places with non-strict housing regulation overall. Most places will at least have strict zoning around mandatory detached single family homes on large lots for most of their residential land. 2. People want to move where there are jobs. So even if some random rural counties actually do have almost no housing regulations, no one's gonna move there because surprise surprise, people need income. If you look at places with strong economies, it's rare to find a place with minimal regulation; even Houston isn't quite as unregulated as its reputation suggests.
- bryanlarsen 2y ago
  > "Too much housing"? What does that even mean? It means recession, like 2008 in the US and today in China. Or at least that was the common wisdom post-2008. Today's problems are at least partially because we implicitly discouraged building to prevent 2008 from recurring. It seems that the 2008 common wisdom was wrong.
  - TulliusCicero 2y ago
    That was caused by financial malfeasance underlying the mortgages that propped up demand beyond the underlying economic strength, not because it was too easy to build things. The idea I'm proposing isn't building behind what demand truly is or should be, but just matching demand. Right now, prices and vacancy rates tell us that demand eclipses supply.
    - bryanlarsen 2y ago
      And the massive price drops of 2008 signaled that supply exceeded demand and that builders should stop building. And they did. Price signals were wrong, we should have kept building. P.S. Canada did not have massive price drops in 2008, and did not stop building. Canada builds a lot more housing per capita than the US, but Canada also has substantially more immigration per capita than the US so Canada's problems are primarily demand side rather than the primarily supply side problems the US sees.

rangestransform 2y ago

> And ways to fix that other than flooding the market with so much housing to force an overabundance. That's kind of wasteful, too. Why? People need to move, and a certain amount of transiently vacant units is necessary for migration to not disrupt local prices too much.

guitarbill 2y ago
Sure, absolutely. But we've also seen that landlords/owners are sometimes happy to keep units vacant. Or just use RealPage. How many vacant units are required? And where? For what it's worth, I agree housing is nutty. But few desirable places have solved it. Not in the US, not in Canada, not in Europe. The "just build more" argument seems a bit simplistic. In an ideal world, it works. But we also wouldn't have villages dying in the country-side, and extremely expensive cities/metro-areas.
- TulliusCicero 2y ago
  > How many vacant units are required? 7% vacancy rate is about the historical average for the US I think. Around there or a bit higher would probably be healthy. > And where? Supply needs to meet demand: we most need new housing where the economy is booming and jobs are being added. But you act like we need some federal authority to say, "okay guys, put housing HERE". That's totally unnecessary: if regulations are streamlined sufficiently, developers will build where demand exists. No central authority required. > But we also wouldn't have villages dying in the country-side, and extremely expensive cities/metro-areas. ??? I'm sorry, are you unaware that most jobs aren't remote or something? This is a very strange and simple thing to misunderstand.
  - guitarbill 2y ago
    > Supply needs to meet demand: we most need new housing where the economy is booming and jobs are being added. > But you act like we need some federal authority to say, "okay guys, put housing HERE". That's totally unnecessary: if regulations are streamlined sufficiently, developers will build where demand exists. No central authority required. Relax. I said no such thing. >> But we also wouldn't have villages dying in the country-side, and extremely expensive cities/metro-areas. > ??? > I'm sorry, are you unaware that most jobs aren't remote or something? This is a very strange and simple thing to misunderstand. I'm just going to quote this for posterity, noting that you cut off "In an ideal world, it works." on purpose. Let's keep things civil, and not try to misrepresent.
    - TulliusCicero 2y ago
      I'm not misrepresenting anything. That you're apparently confused as to why rural villages are dying while major cities are very expensive is just baffling. It's not even really related to it being hard to build, since even if it was easy and there was abundant housing, you'd still expect major cities to be at least somewhat more expensive than rural villages, and it being hard to build housing somewhere isn't why the rural villages are dying. > Relax. I said no such thing. Then what was the point of asking "and where?" Especially since "where demand is high" was already explained. What further answer were you looking for?

TulliusCicero 2y ago

> Time and time again, companies have shown they will cut corners to make money. Building codes that keep buildings safe and lovable are almost never the type of regulation that's a problem here. You'll virtually never find the dispute to be centered around a developer that wants to make a new building that's just kinda shitty and/or unsafe. Rather, the problems tend to be: * Livability concerns from neighbors around parking, views, shadows, traffic, "neighborhood character" (read: keep out them poors). * Environmental reviews, and especially people from the above group using fake environmental concerns to shut down or stall projects that they have a livability problem with. * Overall process just taking a really long time. San Francisco, for example, has basically been chided by the state government repeatedly for taking too long to process new building permits. There's an implicit strawman in your argument, because almost nobody is arguing against basic building codes around safety, or saying we should get rid of zoning that keeps factories or away from schools or whatever. The problem is that initially well intentioned regulations went overboard and have strangled development that we actually want. Imagine if farmers had to attend neighborhood meetings from "concerned individuals" and alleviate their concerns (with attendant delays) every time they planted new crops. That's kind of the situation housing development is in. > How is this obvious? It's obvious at both a macro and micro level. At a macro level, you can just looking at housing prices nationwide, or look at how in a given metro area with a booming economy, housing stock only crawls upwards, despite obvious demand. At a micro level, if you zoom in on an area, you'll quickly discover the issues I've talked about. Zoning makes much potential housing illegal or more expensive to build, and the processes make it much more difficult and more expensive and time consuming. California has a legislative analyst office that's produced various reports about this IIRC, because coastal California has had such an awful housing crisis for so long: https://lao.ca.gov/laoecontax/housing https://lao.ca.gov/laoecontax/housing > A lack of home building, particularly in coastal urban areas, is the fundamental cause of California’s housing crisis. Many factors contribute to this lack of building, chief among them local community resistance to new housing. The high cost and limited availability of housing in California forces many households to make serious tradeoffs in order to live here. > ... > Housing element law requires cities and counties to develop a plan that demonstrates how their planning and zoning rules will accommodate future home building. Our review of available evidence suggests that housing elements fall well short of their goal. Communities’ zoning rules often are out of sync with the types of projects developers desire to build and households desire to live in. There are no easy solutions to this problem. Any major changes in how communities plan for housing will require their active participation and a shift in how local residents view new housing. They've done some great work here, and statewide there's been some progress on the state forcing local governments to stop being such enormous shitheads, standing in the way of new housing. But it's an uphill battle, because of all the cultural momentum against serious new development. > Unable... or unwilling? Unable. Obviously not 100% unable, there's some new housing each year, it's just not enough. And the fact that even local government themselves are uninterested in even trying themselves kind of gives it away. Even the people setting the rules don't want to play the game, they know exactly how painful they've made it. I'm a bay area native so this topic is near and dear to my heart. Bay Area is basically NIMBY central for the whole country, but you can find similar issues almost everywhere, albeit not quite as extreme.

TulliusCicero 2y ago

> And ways to fix that other than flooding the market with so much housing to force an overabundance. "Too much housing"? What does that even mean? Having a lot of housing is good, it means lower prices, and tenants have more power than landlords. Plus, realistically, developers will stop building if there's a total flood, since a flood will lower prices and thus profits. > In the US at least, there usually exist places where there is less regulation. Weirdly, people don't automatically move there. Okay, two things: 1. There's actually very few places with non-strict housing regulation overall. Most places will at least have strict zoning around mandatory detached single family homes on large lots for most of their residential land. 2. People want to move where there are jobs. So even if some random rural counties actually do have almost no housing regulations, no one's gonna move there because surprise surprise, people need income. If you look at places with strong economies, it's rare to find a place with minimal regulation; even Houston isn't quite as unregulated as its reputation suggests.

bryanlarsen 2y ago
> "Too much housing"? What does that even mean? It means recession, like 2008 in the US and today in China. Or at least that was the common wisdom post-2008. Today's problems are at least partially because we implicitly discouraged building to prevent 2008 from recurring. It seems that the 2008 common wisdom was wrong.
- TulliusCicero 2y ago
  That was caused by financial malfeasance underlying the mortgages that propped up demand beyond the underlying economic strength, not because it was too easy to build things. The idea I'm proposing isn't building behind what demand truly is or should be, but just matching demand. Right now, prices and vacancy rates tell us that demand eclipses supply.
  - bryanlarsen 2y ago
    And the massive price drops of 2008 signaled that supply exceeded demand and that builders should stop building. And they did. Price signals were wrong, we should have kept building. P.S. Canada did not have massive price drops in 2008, and did not stop building. Canada builds a lot more housing per capita than the US, but Canada also has substantially more immigration per capita than the US so Canada's problems are primarily demand side rather than the primarily supply side problems the US sees.