[FussyZeus]

> Homes that are built for renting (mainly apartments and condos, but some houses, too) are built for profit. If you make it less profitable to build, fewer will be built. If fewer homes are built, the problem is compounded, not rectified.

Arguments like this continue to be made for more and more aspects of our market: pharmaceuticals, heathcare services, elder care services, and now housing. Everywhere you look the markets seem ill equipped to handle the needs of people.

Maybe the problem is markets then? Maybe the problem is expecting our entire society to work based on profit motive? I don't deny it's served us fairly well for awhile, but it seems like we're hitting the wall a lot lately.

[eloff]

Markets are hardly perfect, but in this specific case it should be the most efficient solution to the problem - if you could fix the zoning and other laws that distort it so badly that it's dysfunctional. And your still going to want to add incentives for things you value but the market does not - perhaps like lower income housing. In some of the other cases you mentioned markets are not necessarily the best solution. Canada benefits greatly from having a single buyer for pharmaceuticals - that concentrates the negotiating power and we get better prices because of it.

[FussyZeus]

What are the zoning laws you see as the problem? Serious question, I'm not in that area and don't know much about SF's zoning issues.

[sologoub]

There are severe restrictions on density and heavy parking requirements just to start. It’s much much more complex than that, but to simplify - people who lived in a given area want it to remain the same.

SF Bay Area is creating 3+ jobs per new unit built (any unit). So the gap is growing rather rapidly, resulting in demand far outpacing supply.

Most of the peninsula cities/towns do not want any growth and want to remain single family home neighborhoods. However, based on demand, they should probably evolve more into either denser row houses or apartment/townhome type.

The way to restrict this from happening is to require more land per sq.ft. of housing and require more parking per bedroom and guest parking for Multifamily housing. All this makes land use less efficient and therefore more expensive, deterring development.

[EpicEng]

The reason that supply is not meeting demand is because the market is not free to expand to meet the needs of the people.

[proverbialbunny]

Kind of. It's improper regulation. You need some regulation or people die, but when regulation is bad it can sometimes be worse than no regulation at all.

In the SF/Bay Area (and possibly CA as a whole) there is more space allocated for businesses than there are for houses. Likewise, zoning is spread out so people have to commute to work. This is why, eg, the greater Los Angeles area has some of the worst traffic in the US, only beaten by Texas and DC.

The history behind these bad regulations comes from racism. In the 50s suburbia was created in such a way to isolate residence selling safety. I don't want to go into the details here, but it's a fascinating piece of US history.

When businesses and commercial are interwoven with residential people stop fighting for the few places close to work, which stops spiking up the price of those areas. Likewise, when the ratio is right there stops being a supply problem, even if it is the same amount of houses. In CA's situation it could mean less business buildings or more urban housing.

[EpicEng]

Well sure; I didn't mean to imply that there should be no zoning/housing regulations, only that it has gone too far in some areas, which has stifled development and caused prices to skyrocket.

[tathougies]

Right instead of a society in which everyone behaves accorsing to their own free choices, and incentivized to make a socially helpful choice via some kind of personal reward (profit), we should instead have a society in which people are incentivized to work for others because of what? Force?

[el_cujo]

You could make the opposite argument as well, that if the market was "freer" or less regulated or whatever then anyone could build and supply would better match demand. It's a situation where you can skew the message whichever way you want to benefit an agenda since most of our systems are neither pure free-market capitalism nor pure socialism. Obviously zealots from either side are going to say our shortcomings are because we've given too many concessions to the other.