[cies]

This issue is much bigger then zoning. It's about redistribution of wealth. Currently there is very little of this happening, yet is it constantly mentioned and threatened to be reduced even further.

Concentration of wealth in the hands of few: this is actually being promoted by all administrations the US has seen in the last decades. If only 80% of the insane military budget could be used to house, feed, cloth and educate EVERY citizen...

[pandemi]

Zoning would help primarily in the highest-cost areas. The blog post doesn't specify it, but the problem is mainly in a few major metropolitan areas, not country-wide.

[raverbashing]

Concentration of wealth is insufficient to explain it:

- there is no lack of cheap housing, however it's outside of main cities

- Concentration of wealth was worse in many moments in history, but that didn't imply in unaffordable real estate (at today's levels)

- Most government regulation works to restrict the supply of housing rather than expand it, even the ones that "theoretically" help with affordability (like rent controls - which I'm not against in some cases).

[bocklund]

The problem is that everyone is trying to concentrate their wealth and that only the wealthy have the means to achieve it.

[cies]

> The problem is that everyone is trying to concentrate their wealth

Here you see people as individuals.

> and that only the wealthy have the means to achieve it.

And here you distinguish classes.

I think this is a class issue, with at the top level: the "wealthy to the extend that you do not have to work to survive" at one side, and the "rest of us" on the other side.

Concentrating wealth to the extend that you can scrape by is a joke. This is called scraping by.

I saw this quote once and had to laugh:

"Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat, but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires."

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Steinbeck

I had to think if it when reading your comment :)