[parineum]

> If you are placing 16+ story housing buildings down, it's because you need the density

Who is "you"? The way your sentence is structured is from the perspective of a city planner zoning a city or a powerful central authority actually building these structures.

In Houston, "you" is an individual and if you are placing a 16+ storing housing building down, you're doing it because you think you can make money renting or selling the units. The idea of relaxed land use regulations (zoning) is to allow demand to plan the city.

> It's an inefficient use of our limited resources, and artificially inflates housing prices by limiting supply.

Efficiency isn't the most important thing to all people. If it was, we'd all live in dormitories and eat in the cafeteria because private bathrooms and kitchens are wasteful. I don't understand what you mean by "artificial" inflation of prices, what's artificial about it?

[Pfhreak]

You means the developer. If a developer has decided to put a big building there, it's because there is demand. Obviously there's no central planning authority, just developers building where they can.

I should have been more specific in 'need the density'. Yes, in today's climate that means 'because someone thought it would be profitable. That's because they saw there was demand for housing there.

> Efficiency isn't the most important thing to all people.

You've constructed a strawman position I don't hold. There's clearly a difference between "we should live in dorms" and "maybe we should discourage single family homes holding the land that could be use to house hundreds of families in apartments or condos."

> I don't understand what you mean by "artificial" inflation of prices, what's artificial about it?

Speculators are buying houses and renting them out in hopes that the land prices will skyrocket as demand for city life increases. By holding the stock of single family homes near urban cores in reserve, they are preventing the land from being used to build large housing developments. Because there is a lack of large housing developments, housing costs are higher than they would be if speculators instead sold all their lots to developers for developing low/mid/highrise housing.

[parineum]

> You've constructed a strawman position I don't hold. There's clearly a difference between "we should live in dorms" and "maybe we should discourage single family homes holding the land that could be use to house hundreds of families in apartments or condos."

I did that entirely on purpose but it wasn't to say that you hold that position. The point was to show that efficiency isn't black and white and, if your justification was efficiency (which it was), there was an even more efficient position than yours. What you're asking for is something more efficient than a multi-acre unoccupied vacation villa and less efficient than military barracks. I wanted to demonstrate that, on the spectrum of efficiency, you're choice of preferring a multi-level housing to a small single family home is just as arbitrary as any other choice.