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Comment by avar | Hacker News Reader

The reason housing is such an issue in the richest parts of the world is because zoning policy is set at the local level. The interests of prospective buyers and market incumbents are at polar opposites.

Byers want cheap housing, but existing owners want their property value to rise. Since those living in the area get to vote the natural outcome is stagnation.

Japan is somewhat getting around this for two reasons. National zoning laws as noted in that article, and expanded upon by e.g. [1], and a zoning law that doesn't lock areas into certain developments, which avoids American-style developments where certain parts of town are only residential, or only office space etc.

1. http://urbankchoze.blogspot.nl/2014/04/japanese-zoning.html

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> The reason housing is such an issue in the richest parts of the world is because zoning policy is set at the local level.

Don't assume US insanity has sway everywhere else. Continental EU zoning models are similar to Japan's, Germany and France zoning are national/federal policies and non-exclusive zoning.

There's also a national planning framework in the UK which dictates housing numbers, etc. Although councils are free to build houses in undesirable parts of their patch, and block development in the wealthy parts.

Something gets lost in translation when we only talk about whether zoning laws are national or not, but no, this insanity is very much the case in the EU as well, and it's even worse in some cases.

Here's an article about how Paris only recently lifted height restrictions (and then in only some areas of the city): http://www.lemonde.fr/planete/article/2010/11/17/feu-vert-po...

Does that mean Paris has different zoning laws? I don't know, but for the purpose of this discussion it clearly amounts to the same thing. The local government is allowed to set policies which inflate the worth of existing properties by restricting the ability to build up.

I live in Amsterdam, and the zoning is extremely restrictive here, down to the level that only certain streets are allowed to have businesses of any sort, height & appearance restrictions etc.

On the other hand Paris proper (where those height restrictions apply) is already one of the densest cities in the world, along with some of its suburban cities [0].

I think around these parts there are two separate problems:

- foreign/1%er investors buying up property and leaving it empty. Across central Paris ~20-30% (depending on districts) of homes are empty [1].

- The city is geographically too small, being locked inside the area of its mid-19th century fortifications, replaced in the 70s by an urban highway. This makes most of the land (and homes) outside of this circular highway much less desirable and therefore a lot less dense. If the suburbs were built as densely as Paris proper, most of the people living in the metro area would be able to live in a space a tenth of the size, avoiding so much commute misery.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_population_d...

[1] https://www.terraeco.net/A-Paris-toujours-plus-de-logements,...

At least in Germany, there are strict rules about where you can build and how. You cannot just buy any farmland and start building. As a consequence, ground prices skyrocket in regions of demand and there isn't enough new construction to put the forces of a free market into effect. Even appartments in multi-storey buidings are usually far to expensive.

Yes, but this is also the only way to preserve any kind of historic character. This decision was made for Tokyo when it was burnt down, but in lots of places preserving the status quo appearance is locally popular.

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