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> I'm fine with having to pay through the nose for a little privacy and a backyard, given the alternative. One could argue that, despite high house prices in the Bay Area, homebuyers are actually drastically underpaying for their land! If we upzoned all of, say, Berkeley, to 3 units per lot rather than the current 1 unit per lot, SFH prices would probably double. (This is because, even if the extra supply reduces home prices, say, from $1m to $700k, each lot will now have the potential to build 3 houses on it, making the lot's land value $2.1m. Of course, this isn't exactly correct—I did not account for construction costs—but you get the idea.). So, in a unzoned/loosely zoned/"fair" world, you would pay a pretty dime for a SF house in a desirable city like Berkeley—a lot more than SF homebuyers pay today. This is something people don't appreciate—SF zoning actually subsidizes SF homebuyers by artificially depressing the value of the land, and therefore not making buyers pay the full opportunity cost for underutilizing the land. (Here the opportunity cost is the 3+ houses that could be built on it instead.) (Not trying to attack OP, who doesn't seem to live in, or want to live in, Berkeley anyway, just making a general point here.) |