[HillaryBriss]

> The lost opportunities for development may theoretically reduce the output of the United States economy by as much as $1.5 trillion a year

We should also do away with National Parks and Forests, which are nothing more than zoning laws at the Federal level.

For that matter, state and local parks get in the way too.

How much lost economic output are restrictions on real estate development in Golden Gate Park costing the city of San Francisco?

How many more people could be housed there if the city simply got out of the way and let the developers build twenty or thirty thousand new units in there?

Why does Federal law even allow a local community like San Francisco so much control over its land?

[stale2002]

You are thinking about things in exactly the wrong way.

For every 1 story increase in building height in a San Francisco apartment complex, there is 10 less houses that have to be build in Suburbia.

10 parcels of land that can now be converted to national parks, and public spaces.

People need a place to live whether you like it or not.

We can either make room for them in the cities, by increasing density and building height limits, or we can stand by and watch as urban sprawl continues to destroy our environment.

[spacecowboy_lon]

But not everyone wants to live in an apartment/flat there are serious downsides to lease hold property's.

A co worker was on the residents committee for a block of flats (london UK) that had to have the roof replaced not cheap and the original contrcator did it wrong and they had to sue them and have it redone.

[pas]

Yes, and?

But living in your own house means you have your own roof, that can just as well needs maintenance, and you also can pick a bad contractor, and so on.

There are trade-offs. And there are external costs. Having your own backyard means usually having and using a car, taking up space close to downtown (because fuck commute times, right?) for just a family (and taking up road capacity too). These are currently undervalued.

The whole housing calamity in the Bay Area (and in London and Berlin) is manifestation of exactly this. (Plus idiotic zoning laws and height restrictions, and of course grafts, bribes, corruption, and the usual.)

[spacecowboy_lon]

Its the difference between a £250,000k Job and a £10k one ogh and coordinating 50-70 different lease holder to pay their share.

Even more extream if your looking at a listed building - which I did when I was looking at buying a ex alms house listed in Pevsner (one of only two buildings of note in my home town)

[pas]

In my experience the paying the lease (or whatever the money due is formally called) is the least controversial part of it. You'll have more problems with the owners of the apartments. (So all the problems of the dreaded HOAs, exist for every building if it's owned by a group - which is quite usual in Europe.)

But these are very low-level problems, and they tend to sort themselves out pretty quickly (in ~5 years, let's say, if the building needs a renovation and the owners were not too keen on participating and saving for it beforehand).

[spacecowboy_lon]

Try getting a mortgage on a property with a short lease <60 Years it can be hard and expensive to extend the lease to make it practicabel.

[stale2002]

Thats fine, but we are already in a position where 10s of millions of people would rather live in the city, but are unable to due to how expensive it is. YOU don't have to move to the city, but if we build more houses in the city, then OTHERS will be able to.

[xg15]

> 10 parcels of land that can now be converted to national parks, and public spaces.

Can be converted to public spaces. However who would make sure that this conversion actually happens? What are the incentives?

[stale2002]

If dense housing is available, this drives down the cost of living/price of houses. If suburbian homes are less valuable, it is cheaper to convert.

Also, driving down the price of housing prevents EXISTING public spaces and parks from being converted into homes, as cities will be less incentivized to do so.

There is already a lot of public spaces that are being converted to houses, so preventing a conversion to urban sprawl is equivalent to converting back to a public space.

[ams6110]

Assuming that suburban houses and apartments in urban multistory complexes are fungible (which they are not).

[stale2002]

Oh they certainly aren't fungible!

In fact, urban apartment complexes in dense cities are much much MORE valuable and desirable than suburban homes. There are 10s of millions of people who would rather live in a desirable place like downtown NYC than the place they are currently living in, if it was as affordable as suburban homes.

The facts that back this up, are housing prices. Housing prices in cities are 4x higher than they are in the countryside, which, due to the laws of supply and demand, means that lots of people prefer city living to suburban living.

[Symmetry]

The statistics I've seen in the US are that about 1/3 of people would prefer living in city centers, 1/3 would prefer suburbia, and 1/3 don't care. And currently 80% of people live in suburbia because city centers are expensive. Apartments and suburban houses aren't the same but our tax and regulatory structure is strongly pushing people towards the later even if that's not what they want.

[zackmorris]

I can't tell if you're being sarcastic, but I can't let this stand without replying. I live in Idaho and the protected areas are relatively pristine (aside from the inevitable gas stations and lodges needed to handle the high volume of sightseers) but the unprotected areas have been largely deforested, desertified and poisoned by extractive timber, grazing and mining practices. They don't tell you that 95% of forests in the lower 48 have been cut so they are no longer old growth, that the droughts are exacerbated by erosion due to loss of native vegetation, that the easily accessible minerals have already mostly been extracted and now we have multi-billion dollar superfund waste sites with mine tailings like arsenic and mercury that we'll be cleaning up for eons at taxpayer expense. The same story is repeated over and over again throughout the west.

For anyone reading this, be wary that the national backlash against public land is being driven by high federal deficits caused by overspending on the military and taxes on the ultra-wealthy that are at nearly an all-time historical low. Remember that we all own public land as individuals and can use it at any time for any purpose that is not destructive. The idea of freely giving away that land to private interests to be exploited for private gain is deeply unsustainable and I mourn for future generations that would miss out on what we enjoy today.

The great tragedy in all this is that I've found that the people in the most enlightened areas, the regions with the most natural resources and beauty left from the time of earliest creation, can take it all so easily for granted and come to take stances that don't ensure its protection. If anyone is on the fence about sustainability vs economic growth, I strongly urge you to do a full accounting with all externalities. You may find that the philosophies and principles that guide environmentally conscious individuals are rooted in logic and not some knee-jerk hysteria like what is sometimes portrayed by infotainment news. I understand that every community is different, but like most things in our society we can rely on a majority sentiment that only thinks one move ahead, not 10 or 20 or 30 like we do. We can’t go wrong by meditating on such important decisions and drawing our own conclusions, which I’m confident will have little alignment with the propaganda of the day.

[HillaryBriss]

Yes. Sarcastic.

I appreciate especially this part of your comment: If anyone is on the fence about sustainability vs economic growth, I strongly urge you to do a full accounting with all externalities.

If we focus on the full accounting of positives (not even looking at externalities), we already see problems with these economic models. They fail to assign positive economic value to the zoning laws.

The economists in the article say something like "these zoning laws are depressing economic output by $1.5 trillion."

But, there's another way to look at it: "the value that communities derive from having the power to zone their cities as they see fit is $1.5 trillion."

In other words, these local communities are willing to exchange $1.5 trillion in easy-to-value economic activity for the power to create not-so-easy-to-value zoning laws. The fact that these economists choose to ignore that economic value does not eliminate that value.

I see it as comparable to a stay-at-home spouse who raises children. Such a person doesn't receive an easy-to-count dollar-value paycheck. But those stay-at-home parents across the country are, without any doubt, working hard and contributing significantly to GDP. It's a matter of measurement, not existence. The economic value definitely exists.

How seriously should any of us take an economic model which completely ignores such contributions to GDP?

[AckSyn]

Developers have a nasty habit of gutting nature and tearing apart the land for a quick cheap buck. And after working for several doing their I.T. work and thus being on the "inside" of their decision making practices, I can tell you they're disgusting parasites. They're the LAST people you want tearing up your countryside to put in cheaply built apartments or even suburban homes.