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Comment by zeroonetwothree | Hacker News Reader

We know it’s from zoning laws because a few places don’t have this problem

> “We have kept our rent increases to about 1% whereas the rest of the country was looking at 31%,” Mayor Jacob Frey said on Monday, citing data from The Pew Charitable Trusts.

> “That’s a drastic difference. And in part, it’s due to the policies that we’ve passed.”

> It’s mostly simple supply and demand, according to Mayor Frey. An explosion of housing, made possible by eliminating single-family zoning requirements, has kept prices down.

https://kstp.com/kstp-news/top-news/rising-rent-costs-slow-d...

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This kind of zoning also builds desireable neighborhoods.

The neighborhood I live in has six-ten unit apartments on the same streets as six-to-ten bedroom mansions. In some places, you can see where the owner of the mansion had an apartment building constructed in their front yard.

I could never imagine this happening today. Yet everyone in the region knows of this neighborhood as being prestigious, with the best schools in the state, huge sidewalks that are packed with people, and a nice little downtown with a coffee shop, dairy whip, a public library branch, and some restaurants.

People have no problem recognizing what a great neighborhood looks like. But for some reason, local politicians can't seem to enact zoning laws that allow them to be built in modern times.

> But for some reason, local politicians can't seem to enact zoning laws that allow them to be built in modern times.

People show up at the city council meeting and scream at them that the construction will destroy the neighborhood.

This sounds a lot like my neighborhood. The zoning is very mixed and the outcome is great. It’s now a highly desirable area.

Most Japanese cities have little to no zoning. They ended up with some very desirable and,livable cities; of them, Tokyo is 31M and basically zero slums.

FTA:

> In his budget address last week, the Mayor recommended $18 million in the city’s budget for 2024 go into new affordable housing and another $5 million in ongoing funding for building and maintaining going forward.

> Statewide, the legislature invested more than a billion dollars to the cause. Exactly how far that’ll all go remains to be seen.

This is not due to a change to zoning laws — the construction is dependent on substantial public funding. As you’ve demonstrated it is “bigger government” that is the solution to this problem.

> Still, on average, people are spending about 40% of their paychecks on renting a place to live.

I think it's fair to say they've made progress in slowing the growth of the housing problem, but it is a big stretch to say they don't have a housing affordability problem.

Housing is mostly local but a little bit national. If you have better housing prices than other cities, well, some people can work from home, guess who's moving in. People compare cost of living when choosing a new job.

Get most cities to do what they did and you get less of this net migration and housing becomes more affordable everywhere.

Some of this also takes time. You let people build, they start to build, that doesn't mean they've stopped yet.

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