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Comment by crooked-v | Hacker News Reader

There's no big secret here. Dump restrictive zoning requirements, remove subjective approval processes, and make the permitting process a "shall approve" instead of "may approve", and you'll see a lot of new housing get built very quickly. All the slowdowns and immense extra expenses are self-inflicted by city residents who either don't care, don't want cheaper housing, or have been infected by the terminally brainless anti-housing pseudo-left.

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The restrictive zoning practices, long approval processes ridiculous permitting costs etc are in place because most people's entire net worth is held up in housing and they vote for laws that keep the price high for that reason.

It's completely backwards to think that the reason why housing is expensive is because of those symptoms when the root cause is more than half the population wants mega high housing costs.

If height limits were raised with zoning for multi family housing, those investments would sky rocket faster than under NIMBY

And yet here we are

Despite the uniformed nonsense you might read here, the most active NIMBYs aren't primarily motivated by property values. If you actually talk to them you'll find that they have no wish to ever sell and are worried (sometimes irrationally) about quality of life issues: noise, parking, traffic, crime, privacy, etc.

Tell me more about how they don't care about their property value they are simply trying to uphold the character of the neighborhood.

Really the property owners and landlords are the victims here.

Imagine you spend half your working class life saving for an absolute shit hole for half a million, knowing it's an NFT that no one can build more of. Then permitting laws are liberalized and suddenly your NFT is worth no more than the labor and material cost to physically build the house, minus depreciation.

It's difficult because losing that NFT means they are fucked in retirement. Oh well for them, stupid them for wanting a house while nimby zoning was in effect.

The losers unfortunately won't be the boomers that made the dumbass laws but the people they squeezed afterwards. It's a totally fucked situation.

I hope it's clear that I'm not blaming the average person caught up in the housing market for the broader climate in which they live. It is fucked and I don't see a way out. If we build enough housing the price of their retirement asset drops and they are fucked and if we don't then we continue seeing mass homelessness and dropping birth rates.

I don't have a solution, I'm commenting that the typical things that are blamed for the housing shortage are symptoms not causes.

The value is in the land, not the house. If you own a plot of land with a single family house on it, and suddenly someone is able to build an apartment building on that piece of land, it will actually become much more valuable because an apartment building generates much more revenue than a SFH. They could easily sell the land to a developer and retire somewhere else.

It's not obvious that would stay fixed: depending on the dynamics of the market, it could go up, it cold go down (The demand is for housing, not land. If you manage to increase supply for housing sufficiently by increasing density, then the value is the land could go down even if you could build many more homes on it than before). I agree it's not certain that it would go down, however.

It becomes obvious as housing density approaches infinity. Why would anyone buy your land for housing if they need one tiny spec to house a billion? This is simple supply and demand, high density housing lowers land value, as price isn't determined primarily by potential utility .

Sure, you can always make an obvious argument at an extreme, but then you need to demonstrate that the extreme is relevant (like, the function is monotonic, not very common in economics).

Why on earth would apartment builder buy my land specifically for housing when they can dump a mega apartment complex anywhere? This is simple supply and demand.

As density limits rise, housing land demand lowers. In the extreme of infinite density, demand goes to zero, as everyone can fit in a pinpoint and we don't need other land for housing. We get the opposite as your prediction as everyone lowers prices hoping to undercut to get the single pinpoint bid.

You misunderstand. Most of them aren't specifically concerned with neighborhood character. They are mostly long-term resident homeowners (not landlords) who don't want the hassle and annoyance that comes with higher density. If you want to counteract their efforts then at least understand their motivations instead of treating them like caracitures.

At some point someone with authority just has to draw the line. Those people’s desires to not be hassled is not important, and the need for sufficient housing supply is.

That is overly dismissive. Back in the post war era there was a huge problem with slum lords and corrupt builders constructing terrible residential units that were unlivable and began to fall apart as soon as tenants moved in. In response layers of requirements were added and regulators who had benign intentions went way too far. That all these rules would crash residential construction in the 1970s such that it would never recover was not foreseen at all.

If the problem is such slumlords and builder profiteers they wouldn't have made it damn near impossible to be an unregulated owner builder for your families own homestead, but instead imposed those regulations only on the profiteers who wouldn't be living there.

No, this is intentional. It was damn near impossible to find a place where a man can still build his own home near civilization without oversight.

The problem with "shall approve" is that sometimes the best answer really is "no".

A lot of ecological disasters are averted by processes that seem long and drawn out, but which actually are just companies not understanding that "no, we don't want you to burn down the planet around us". Residential is obviously somewhat different, but not entirely.

"Ecological disasters" is covered by putting in objective instead of subjective rules. The point is to make objections like "doesn't fit neighborhood character" / "blocks the view" / "would replace this extremely historic run-down laundromat" hold no weight in the process.

The environmental cost of saying "no" to denser housing on land that is already developed is extremely high, and leads to development on green fields where there is nobody to oppose the development.

There should be an automatic "yes" to any mixed use housing and small retail development that is infill, from an environmental perspective.

There should be an automatic "no" to any greenfield development, additional parking, or freeways. And to get over that "no" there should be strong environmental studies that show benefit, not just neutrality.

Our existing built environment is unsustainable and needs to change drastically. Keeping it in the current state is untenable. We should be radically reshaping it as fast as possible with the fewest brakes if we care about the environment.

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