A look at Denver’s “Unlocking Housing Choices” plan
freerange.city
freerange.city
Denver takes 264 days to approve "multi-family or industrial projects with a valuation in excess of $1.5 million, such as a new apartment or office building, large additions" [1]. Construction loans in Colorado cost "8% to 13%" [2]. For a project with $1.5mm up-front costs, from land purchases to permit fees and legal costs, that comes to $87 to 141 thousand per project.
This isn't as bad as San Francisco, where permiting delays alone add hundreds of thousands of dollars to housing costs. But in addition to upzoning, it's something to be considered, particularly since Denver seems to categorise practically all impactful residential development as "major commercial."
[1] https://www.denvergov.org/Government/Agencies-Departments-Of...
[2] https://www.clearhouselending.com/commercial-loans/colorado/...
This isn't an accident. They know what they're doing.
Every municipality tries to do this to the extent they think they can get away with it because it's an end run around your property right. There's all sorts of residential exemptions and precedents and case law and courts and politicians tend not to be in a hurry to screw homeowners because there's tons of them.
By classifying you as commercial it gives them a) all sorts of capricious authority to micromanage the pettiest of details and/or force you to expend money with no recourse except "haha, sue us peasant".
And this is how they get it: don't make it literally illegal to build housing, but make it economically impossible in practice. Then they can go "welp, nothing's getting built, I guess there's nothing we could've done", and as an added bonus they also get to say "looks like the free market can never fix our housing shortage!"
Unsurprisingly, affordability is so bad. In lots of major cities, a one-bed rental takes around 50% of a mid-career post-tax salary. You have become an indentured servant for whatever real estate fund owns your property. Lots of regulatory capture behind the scenes.
Ironically, some parts of the UK, including Home Counties, are now much better than most EU, including Scandinavia, with lots of shared ownership and affordable housing schemes. It's really easy. Increasing the supply of homes, in particular first homes, and preventing predatory tactics to constrain supply.
In the 1970s-80s You People (TM) (as a group, not you personally because you're not that old, probably) decided you wanted to segregate commercial and residential and you wanted setbacks and min parking. So strip malls became because they became the minimum viable commercial development displacing the right on the street, maybe set back by ~20ft if you have parking (usually 90deg from the road) at the storefront multi tenant commercial buildings that dominated previously.
And so now you say that's ugly, that's not walkable, we want mixed use, we want parking in back, etc, etc.
The problem isn't that your rules were wrong. The problem is that anyone let you micromanage in the first place. So the solution isn't to adopt zoning v2, v3, etc. It's to stop letting you micromanage.
This is fundamentally what we're talking about.
A business that requires a retail footprint in 2026 is going to want to do that in the cheapest, most controlled way possible.
If McDonalds could buy formerly-SFH/R lots and build stores with 2 parking spaces + street parking, that's exactly what they would do. There's too much money not to.
We can gripe about zoning's effectiveness in producing "good" cities, but I'm far less sympathetic to arguments against its existence.
Without zoning limits, you get nasty, brutish, and short city lives where sociopathic businesses are concerned.
That seems like a contradiction.
This is a good thing!
Overall I think this is simply an outcome of NIMBYism, regulators over regulating to justify their existence, and a K shaped economy.
There's nothing wrong with the market building what there is actual money in. No one should be forced to lose money to serve those who cannot afford the product. (That's the space of charities)
Denver seems to have done an amazing job, relative to other places I've been, at actually adding a lot more housing. The market likely would be _worse_ had there not been so much built (and building)
So, homelessness for the rest then?
It's true that the gentrification process speeds up when there is no building, as those differences in preferences mean existing tenants are competing with even richer people, and would have to move even further out, but the change in preferences still exists, and thus the gentrification is straight out unavoidable.
Besides, in almost every place where we have serious housing problems, the small changes proposed here are insufficient. When the land is expensive, the normal behavior everywhere is to redevelop plots to the maximum economically viable density. Turning 1 house into 4, which would sell for 500k each, doesn't make sense when the possibility of an apartment building is there. Single stairway apartments turn those 4 cottage homes into 16 3-4 bedroom units. If one is simplifying permitting anyway, why not simplify it for that density, and get far more out of the same land. Those 4 new cottages, now new, would not get redeveloped again for another 30, 40 years, so they would become difficult to afford really quickly. That's why you don't see many places actually attempting this low key densification, as it's way too much work for what you get.
Desires are much more relevant in day-to-day politics. Rights are less frequently up for question.
the city of vienna mandates that 2/3rd of any new housing is subsidized. so instead of controlling the price all over, you control the price of a part, and make sure that every neighborhood has room for low income families. in other words you enforce mixing. singapore is another city with a lot of subsidized housing.
Controls on housing prices make it easy to claim "look we made it cheaper" at the cost of forcing people to move away.
that's every large city in germany too. except in vienna it only affects 1/3rd of the population because everyone else lives in affordable subsidized housing. exactly who has been forced to move away?
Vienna can't grow anymore as a result.
huh? vienna has been growing from 1.5 million to 2 million in the last 3 decades. and it hasn't even reached the peak population it had a century ago. it is also building whole new neighborhoods. i don't know how you get the idea that it can't grow anymore. nothing could be further from the truth. there is plenty of space for new development in the east for example.
the system in vienna may not be perfect, but it does better than any other large city in austria and germany and maybe even in europe. criticizing is easy, but i don't think it's fair when the situation everywhere else is worse.
your first claim: vienna has become unaffordable because of its subsidized housing.
that claim in itself makes no sense because subsidies are what makes housing affordable. if your argument is that it caused the prices of the private market to go up, then that is false too because munich and berlin have average rents that are even higher, and other german cities are on par. vienna private rent prices are not out of the ordinary for a city that size. in other words subsidizing housing can't have had any worse effect on the private rental market than whatever those cities in germany do.
your second claim: Vienna can't grow anymore as a result.
vienna is building almost 10k homes every year and has been doing so for the last decade or more. that may not be enough, but that's certainly not for lack of space. there is still plenty of space for the city to grow, especially in the east part of the city where farmland is within the city borders.
i am countering your claims. what do you expect me to ask here? do you have any evidence for your claims?
you say you wished that i understood that there were real criticisms.
well, what are these criticisms? again, compared to other large german cities which are mostly worse i find it hard to believe that there is any valid criticism against vienna's approach. but let's hear it, i am willing to accept that i am wrong because i may have missed something. so what am i missing?
> The second concept is to incentivize retention of existing buildings by allowing substantial new construction behind them. Basically, let people cash in on their backyard. This is a significant expansion of the accessory unit rules we have today, and the city’s concept art suggests that it would allow backyard cottages larger than the existing homes (a big change).
This is interesting and I wonder how it would change neighborhood dynamics. I'm not opposed at all because it enables more potential housing options. We have a few of these in the neighborhoods I frequent, but from what I've heard, it's somewhat cost prohibitive in the current form to be worth building one. If this helps make ADUs (maybe the ADU would become the original structure in this case), then that seems like progress.
> The third concept is to allow more units if one unit is deed-restricted to be permanently “affordable.” This is basically the same logic as the first proposal — let developers sell more square footage if they do something residents want: in this case, deed-restrict part of the square footage to be priced below market rate.
This would be helpful for allowing current residents with lower incomes than the newcomers to stay in the neighborhood without taking away an existing dwelling unit from the market. Deed-restrictions kind of concern me, but this seems like a decent compromise to prevent displacement.
> What I don’t see in any of the proposals so far is streamlining and expediting permitting for developers who pursue the path the city wants: more, less expensive homes, rather than fewer, more expensive homes.
Indirectly, the removal of parking minimums from the zoning code should help with this. I think there was also a change to allow single stairways in the zoning which creates a bit more incentive for developers and potentially eases the permit process.
Hear, hear! Finally someone gets it. Same day permits for all high density housing projects.
BTW, the NIMBYs are definitely going to fight the cottage homes tooth and nail otherwise. "Where will all the new cars go???"
1. Remove Zoning / Deed Restrictions / Parking Minimums
2. Remove Red Tape (Environmental impact assessments, time cap approvals to a couple weeks, at cost fees)
3. Land Value Taxes
Watch as Gentrification suddenly goes away and infill development occurs. These complicated schemes are unnecessary.
>Remove Red Tape (Environmental impact assessments
I absolutely understand what prompts this desperation, but much like the desperation that prompted the election of Trump, it's very, very much more bad than it is good.
Every idiot (they're not even useful anymore FFS, look at the results) says this based on abstract assessments of individual rules and laws. But in practice the overall effect of the system is that all those environmental assessments and stormwater permits and all the other things aren't even speed bumps for big business interests with lawyers and engineers on staff. Those interests can construe any evil as compliant and do so at cost. The rules are unscalable cliffs to "normal" people and businesses who can't justify paying mid four to low five figures up front for projects that might not even generate that much value.
Environmental impact assessments are great if they actually do what they say. But they can also be weaponized to block any new development in existing cities. Forcing suburban sprawl into less populated areas is a worse outcome if you want to protect the environment.
Is it? I don’t have a clear picture in either direction. What does an environmental impact assessment for a housing project typically result in?
Would the environmental assessment help? I'd like to think so, but when I almost bought in the area, I discovered that the floodplain maps were "optimistic."
Jane Jacobs had a chapter about fixing this in 1961, and she's 10x more right now than she was then.
Some cheap side of town where a new apartment complex is built on a parking lot of a half-dead strip mall? If it’s “new” it’s going to cost new. Local neighborhood residents won’t be able to afford commercial rent for a mom & pop restaurant compared to bougie-looking expensive shops. That’s gentrification, practically caused by infill development.
I agree that development is crucial, and agree with a lot of your comment. The fact of the matter is that new developments are by definition more expensive to rent out, so any kind of development in a rundown neighborhood will have a tendency to increase prices & drive out residents. There’s no easy way around that fact without government intervention.
The best we can hope for is maxing our development in dense spaces to the point that it won’t need to undergo another such drastic change any time soon, and having government programs to help the people impacted.
If people couldn't afford food because there wasn't enough food grown, no one would think handing out food stamps would work. It's silly to think that doesn't work for housing.
1. https://www.governing.com/housing/how-houston-cut-its-homele...
2. https://www.lahsa.org/news?article=1051-lahsa-releases-final...
Texas has a recent and storied history of just busing people out of state or into other cities for people it deems are problematic or they don't want to deal with. So it would not surprise me if some of the stats are cooked or they've partially swept the problem under the rug.
What you've suggested may account for some of the difference. But "Houston has liberal zoning and builds more houses" is a far simpler explanation for the staggering 25x difference in homeless population between the cities.
It's so poisonous to politics, and everyone does it for their pet peeve.
Can't do permitting reform, can't fix education, can't loosen bad regulation, all of it because someone you don't like might benefit and fuck that guy.
https://www.amazon.com/Triumph-City-Greatest-Invention-Healt...
I'm glad I'm living on my 10,000 ft² lot with multiple fruit trees, multiple vegetable gardens, berry gardens, bird-friendly bushes, and neighbors who are a good distance away from me. The only thing I would change is to reduce the light pollution so you can see six-magnitude stars from the backyard.
Now, if somebody wants to buy the property and convert it to a dense housing space, after I'm dead, great, I won't be in a position to care. But right now, I very much care about getting rid of lawns, building bird-friendly habitats, and growing plants you can eat.
Neighbourhoods change, some get richer and some get poorer. That is the way of things. Both poor and rich alike need somewhere to live.
How would you do this?
> and bring the sale value of property down
Can't happen without causing a lot of pain. In large part due to the debt. Holding prices flat in nominal terms is the best-case outcome; holding them flat in real terms the most likely one. Either, however, beats real appreciation.
(For what it's worth, I'm a homeowner with a jumbo mortgage.)
It depends on the city—some cities do indeed handle rainwater with the normal sewer system, but most have an entirely separate system for rainwater [0]. But either way, if you pave more roads, you're always going to have more rainwater to deal with, regardless of which system of pipes you use.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storm_drain#Combined_sewers
2. It's not just roads but also roofs etc., is it common to drain the house roof into a different system than the rest of the house? Of course in a house with a large lot you can drain into a garden or whatever but that's not possible in densely built areas. In our city it all ends up in one system but of course we've had a sewer system since the middle ages or so.
Yes of course, I forgot where I was in the thread, sorry.
> 2. It's not just roads but also roofs etc., is it common to drain the house roof into a different system than the rest of the house? Of course in a house with a large lot you can drain into a garden or whatever but that's not possible in densely built areas. In our city it all ends up in one system but of course we've had a sewer system since the middle ages or so.
I'm mainly familiar with smaller buildings, but I know that it's illegal to drain rainwater into the main sewer system, so presumably the bigger buildings are hooked up to the storm sewer system.
The climate here is kinda bizzare though: it's fairly common to get a few days of +15°C while there's still 3' of snow on the ground, and as you can imagine, that causes a ton of runoff from all the melting. And very little here is more than a century old, so everything is comparatively modern.
The use of "code" is confusing for HN, but "gentrification" is a useful red flag about the content.
That's because WE DO NOT HAVE a housing crisis. And yes, I'm not crazy.
We have 1.1 housing units per family right _now_. We likely will have the record number of housing units per capita within about 2 years just due to the current pipeline of new housing. These numbers are easy to verify.
Why are we talking about housing then? That's because we have a JOBS crisis. The only available good jobs are concentrated in a dwindling number of dense areas. And making it easier to build makes the jobs crisis even worse.
Don't believe me? Look at Vancouver, BC. They did everything: automated transit, soul-crushingly depressive high rises near transit stations, (de-fact) prohibited foreign ownership of housing, streamlined permitting.
Guess what happened? If your guess is "plentiful cheap housing" then make another guess.
I'm not saying anything even remotely factually controversial. Housing units per household: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=15tRv
It's also not controversial that major job density increases are happening in a few select metros: https://www.route-fifty.com/workforce/2019/06/job-density-re... or if you look more broadly, that smaller cities in the US are dying out.
I simply arrived at a different conclusion: we don't need to continue deepening this death spiral by "building more".
Regardless, I don't understand what your proposed solution to this supposed "jobs crisis" is.
> Regardless, I don't understand what your proposed solution to this supposed "jobs crisis" is.
Tax the dense office space, or do cap&trade. Incentivize remote work. Treat commute time as work time. Prohibit dense housing except in special cases (university campuses, military bases, senior living, etc.). Promote and subsidize self-driving cars.
Why?
A factory that dumps raw waste into rivers is more efficient and can produce widgets more cheaply than a factory that takes care to clean up the waste.
A firm in a dense city core can get talent more easily, and it'll have advantage (on average, in the long run) over a firm that has a fully remote workforce. The negative externalities (living in poor conditions in an expensive city) are offloaded onto the workers. E.g. the housing square footage keeps decreasing: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/charted-the-growing-gap-bet...
Cities are more efficient in practically every way than subsidized rural developments. It’s really weird to flip that around as an externality. (Disclaimer: I moved from New York to Wyoming. Thanks for your subsidies, I guess.)
There absolutely are jobs in remote places. But the people there aren’t as valuable as someone who will bump into like-minded colleagues and cultural expression as part of their existence in a cluster.
No, they're not. It's the other way around, in fact. Suburbs subsidize cities (on average, again).
The dense city cores produce most of the _corporate_ income tax, because that's where the companies are headquartered. But most of _personal_ income tax comes from suburbs. This is only now getting close to flipping around.
Cities also have YUUUUGE expenses that simply don't happen in sparse areas. E.g. infrastructure like water or sewer is wildly expensive in cities because of the planning overhead. Case in point: San Francisco spent almost half a billion rebuilding a few blocks of road.
Cities also require EXPENSIVE public transit. One ride on a bus/subway in the US costs around $20. I'm talking about the true cost (number of trips / total expenses), not the farebox cost. And with capex it's almost incalculable, with crazy numbers like $50 per ride for Seattle.
The TLDR; version:
1. Infrastructure in suburbs might end up being a bit more expensive on a per-capita basis. Or it might not, depending on the way you do accounting.
2. In any case, this difference is not at all significant.
3. Suburbs are _not_ subsidized, and in fact generate most of the wealth in the US.
Its biggest problem is that it was written before the negatives of the density death spiral became apparent.
The cities in the early 2000-s were the main benefactors of the global crime collapse. So suddenly, Times Square in NYC transformed from a blighted area into the world's most valuable real estate. How could you be negative about urbanism seeing that? Housing in cities was also relatively cheap because cities used to be less desirable than suburbs.
If I were to summarize, "Triumph of the City" is factually correct. Just as the statement: "coal power plants are a triumph of engineering, providing cheap, reliable, and accessible power".
Edit: another important thing that he's missing is the end of the population growth. So now it's a nearly zero-sum game: a new housing unit in Manhattan means one more dilapidated house in rural Ohio.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/COMPSFLAM1FQ
Also, firm in a dense city can get better talent, but those negative externalities (and I would argue these externalities are not clearly caused by the mployer) are made up for through increased salaries the firm must pay compared to areas with lower living costs.
It has been on the downward trend since then.
> Also, firm in a dense city can get better talent, but those negative externalities (and I would argue these externalities are not clearly caused by the mployer) are made up for through increased salaries the firm must pay compared to areas with lower living costs.
Except that the increased salary does NOT compensate for the increased cost of living. And firms absolutely don't pay for their impact on infrastructure.
My favorite example: Seattle. Each household will end up paying around $150k in additional taxes for the new transit that will benefit primarily dense office holders in the downtown.
It is clearly cherry picked because the graph begins in 2015, which (as you can see in the one I linked) is the exact peak of the new build house sizes. A more honest article would show a larger date range.
Additionally, I feel it makes sense that new builds are getting smaller. People are generally having fewer children these days, so there shouldn't be as much need for huge houses.
> Except that the increased salary does NOT compensate for the increased cost of living. And firms absolutely don't pay for their impact on infrastructure.
It may not entirely make up for the cost of living, but in most cases I would say it certainly makes a big dent. And the rest of the difference can just be explained by the fact that people want to live in cities. So shouldn't it make sense that the cost of living is higher in these areas given that there is more demand for them?
> My favorite example: Seattle. Each household will end up paying around $150k in additional taxes for the new transit that will benefit primarily dense office holders in the downtown.
I think it's strange to frame public transit as primarily benefiting dense office-holders. There are tons of other entities in cities besides just companies in offices. It's a public good, and transit generally benefits everyone. Citizens, companies, government, educational institutions, etc.
Also please link to where I can read more about the $150k number.
I mean... That was exactly the point.
> A more honest article would show a larger date range.
Sure. It provides an even better illustration about how the runaway urbanism resulted in breaking the previous trend of increasing living area.
> Additionally, I feel it makes sense that new builds are getting smaller. People are generally having fewer children these days, so there shouldn't be as much need for huge houses.
You might have cause and effect confused here.
> I think it's strange to frame public transit as primarily benefiting dense office-holders.
Why is it strange? In the counter-factual world without the dense office core, the new transit would have been useless.
> There are tons of other entities in cities besides just companies in offices.
And none of them requires the amount of traffic that justifies $150k per household.
> Also please link to where I can read more about the $150k number.
https://mynorthwest.com/kiro-opinion/sound-transit-3-34-5-bi...
Great. So we agree it is cherry picked.
> Sure. It provides an even better illustration about how the runaway urbanism resulted in breaking the previous trend of increasing living area.
I don't follow the logic here. Why would 2015 be the tipping point? What's so special about that year? The US has been increasingly urbanizing since WW2.
https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/usa/uni...
> You might have cause and effect confused here.
Just to be clear, you're suggesting that people are having fewer kids (fertility had a recent peak in 2007) because new builds (which are just a small percentage of total housing stock!) have lost a few square feet? I find that to be laughable.
> Why is it strange? In the counter-factual world without the dense office core, the new transit would have been useless.
1. There are more than just offices in CBDs. There are also retail, restaurants, entertainment venues, residential, etc.
2. This ignores the benefit to the worker. And employer/employee relationship goes two-ways. You assign all the benefits to the employers (who gain access to a larger talent pool), while ignoring the fact that this benefits workers too by increasing the pool of jobs they can reliably and comfortably commute to.
3. Economic gains for employers are not purely extractive. A thriving and dynamic centeral business district helps provide income for residents, drive increased investment, and foster innovation.
> And none of them requires the amount of traffic that justifies $150k per household.
Sports venues. Concerts. Festivals. Parades. Any large gathering of people. Not to mention that it's still a good thing to have for general use to go anywhere, even at non-max-capacity times.
https://mynorthwest.com/kiro-opinion/sound-transit-3-34-5-bi...
Not seeing that $150k per household number anywhere in that article. Looks like $10k per person is the number they come up with. Expensive to be sure, but not quite the number you somehow arrived at.
Got it. You have no idea what you're talking about. "Cherry-picking" means finding parts of data that go against the actual trend but "confirm" your point.
> I don't follow the logic here. Why would 2015 be the tipping point? What's so special about that year? The US has been increasingly urbanizing since WW2.
The tipping point was around 2010-2011, it just took some time to become visible. I love bureaucracy; it's the greatest invention of humanity. I traced the policy changes that started the enshittification in earnest to around that time.
For example, that's the year when Seattle's DoT changed the road scoring method so that a field with trenches would get a perfect score. SF started its war-on-cars around the same time and passed the "Twitter exemption".
> Just to be clear, you're suggesting that people are having fewer kids (fertility had a recent peak in 2007) because new builds (which are just a small percentage of total housing stock!) have lost a few square feet? I find that to be laughable.
People are having fewer kids because inner cities are inimical to having _multiple_ children. One child is fine, but 3 children are almost impossible without a parent staying at home.
It's not the _sole_ reason, but it very much is _a_ reason. And you can trace that correlation throughout all the developed world, including the bike hellscape of the Netherlands. And transit availability only _strengthens_ the correlation.
> Sports venues. Concerts. Festivals. Parades. Any large gathering of people.
So basically: nothing. Nothing here justifies the ginormous expense and the associated deterioration in the quality of life.
> 1. There are more than just offices in CBDs. There are also retail, restaurants, entertainment venues, residential, etc.
No, there is not. Entertainment venues, restaraunts, etc. can just as much stay distributed through the city.
> 2. This ignores the benefit to the worker. And employer/employee relationship goes two-ways. You assign all the benefits to the employers (who gain access to a larger talent pool), while ignoring the fact that this benefits workers too by increasing the pool of jobs they can reliably and comfortably commute to.
Ha. I have numbers for that ( https://www.nature.com/articles/s42949-021-00020-2 ). A worker in the 80-s US could access 2x workplaces compared to their counterpart in Europe within a 30-minute commute. Because of cars.
If you shackle yourself to transit, your world rapidly shrinks into tiny "beads" of accessible area outside of stations. While a car provides you true point-to-point travel freedom.
> Not seeing that $150k per household number anywhere in that article. Looks like $10k per person is the number they come up with.
This is the _additional_ expense per _person_. I have calculations from the recent estimates.
what is that supposed to mean? most other places people talk favorably about biking in the netherlands. and i can confirm that, i have been traveling there on a bike myself.
Yes, there are laws that, if passed, would stop or slow or even reverse the increasing price of real estate. Would they pass? Hard to say and probably not quickly.
As has been repeated many times: it's in the financial interest of people who own property to increase their property's value by constraining supply via zoning/building codes, and they usually have a good amount of influence in the local politics that determine these rules.
The solve is fairly straightforward: allow absolute maximum density so long as it is built safely.
You'll get tall apartment buildings pretty quick. Then everyone can go to the schools and enjoy the low crime and fast fire response.
But that isn't allowed because incumbents don't want it.
There's not much new about this... it's the same story all over the US.
At least some places are different:
We'll see once 2025 ACS data is released.
Stop. Trying. To. Fix. Prices.
The only way to "fix" prices is to increase supply, which the plan does really well otherwise!
This was the subject of extensive proof in a recent HN thread, where shockingly... the only thing that moved the needle was... shockingly... increasing supply. No matter of "well yeah, but we can do it differently this time" will fix it. You can only increase supply. Its the only lever you have.
It's only real gentrification when upper-middle class YIMBYs get forced out.
The author acknowledges that a lot of the gentrification is the result of zoning rules, and has only proposed what are primarily less restrictive zoning rules as a potential solution.
Doesn't gentrification happen not from spontaneous combos of zoning rules but when someone with money wants to live somewhere, so they do? It's part of the golden rule: he with the gold makes all the rules, unless you can go asymmetric economic warfare and fire back with zoning & NIMBY laws.
Between AI and whatever housing problems are being felt by co-founders and advisors and chairs at posh institutions, the flattening of the upper-middle class is a sight to behold.