They talk a lot about the housing crisis in California as the result of over regulation of development, but I think that’s only part of the problem. Even if you stripped out all of the regulations that slow down the process, I doubt we’d be in a much better place in a few years.
Rather we’d have a bunch of new shiny buildings sitting nearly empty because they were built as assets more than as homes, and filling them would depress the price of housing and thus decrease the value of them as assets.
We see this in places like Vancouver, and all over china. China built housing like mad, way to much even, and yet, the cost to buy a house or rent is still sky high in the places people need to work for their jobs.
There is a shortage of housing, and we do need to build more capacity, but, we need to choose how and where we build based on a larger number of metrics than what traditional for profit developers are willing to consider.
Fantastic points, and I think that’s touched upon when the author talks about ‘brokenness’ towards the end. There’s systems that don’t work, and it’s not just issues of regulation that are needed to fix it. Much like progressives in the early 1900s had to radically rethink entire systems (new deal) we need similar ideas today to fix problems which are multifaceted and difficult. Affordable housing is infrastructure, unaffordable housing is not.
