With better planning the same capacity could have been added but with way better quality of life.
Just deregulating exposes the land to the whim of the developer’s good will — trusting them not to get the most bang for the buck out of building a slum, which is a fickle guarantee.
If there’s no short term profitability, public sector needs to step in. Housing is infrastructure, it’s crucial to the land’s growth.
In pretty much every other sector of the economy, the government regulates safety, and quality comes via competition. Housing should be no different.
But because we've artificially throttled the amount of housing that can be built, the best way to improve profits is to push down the quality as the buyers don't really have an alternative
Here my thoughts about ideal markets https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=46085880
Take Amazon or the Chinese webshops, they've flooded the market with products that do the same thing but cheaper, but whose quality is way lower.
Take the acquisitions of e.g. power tool brands by investors, who then use the brand's brand awareness and quality inertia to cut costs and boost their profit margin.
Take hotels, which used to feel luxurious but which have over time been redesigned to require minimal maintenance and personnel.
The only competitive market where they try to one-up each other on quality is aimed at the rich where money is not an issue. The middle ground is disappearing.
BTW A mediocre apartment in your name is still an apartment. I grew up in one, but in our then-relatively-precarious family situation, the fact that we weren't renting and no one could just throw us out made a lot of other problems and crises way, way more bearable. Even though the bathroom was subpar and the kitchen horribly old.
We shouldn't be dismissive of lower quality products if they still can provide value to their owners.
1. It takes a really long time to develop housing in a meaningful way, like on the order of decades to build communities.
2. People don't actually really choose where to live, it's a lot like hospitals. You live where your job is, which means the more economically strong a place is (city) the more housing you need. Which is why cities are dense. It might sound obvious, but it's not like choosing which brand of cereal to buy.
You can enforce technical standards so that no "slum-like" building gets built, and already in the planing phase. Zoning is more about precluding certain type of buildings, or maybe any new buildings, altogether.
you have quite a breezy perception of hell. does something like this actually bother anyone with a brain who chose to live in a city?
That’s not at all likely.