[halpert]

I've looked into moving to Japan. My family has a house in Setagaya, which had severely distorted what I thought Tokyo living to be. It turns out, a typical one bedroom apartment is like 20 sq meters.

Separate from that, I don't believe zoning has anything to do with housing shortages. Housing has "induced demand" similar to traffic. You can look at heavy traffic over a bridge and think, "if only we had another bridge, that would alleviate the traffic." But it turns out, when you do that, more people end up using both bridges and traffic becomes as bad as it was before. Housing is similar. If you build more houses, even more people want them. Look at places like NYC, which has extremely dense housing. It's still expensive.

[Nelkins]

This is absolutely wrong. Pretty much every single piece of evidence we have shows that zoning has a massively impactful effect on the supply of housing. Similarly, the vast majority of studies looking at the issue show that induced demand doesn't occur for housing (that is, adding housing supply does lower prices, rather than simply causing people to consume more).

With regard to NYC, even though it has added around 250-300K housing units over the past fifteen years or so, it has added around three times that in jobs. If housing supply isn't increasing in line with people, you will see increases in prices.

Some links:

- https://www.planetizen.com/news/2019/06/104783-doubt-cast-in...

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c7FB_xI-U6w

- https://furmancenter.org/thestoop/entry/supply-skepticism-ho...

- https://furmancenter.org/files/sotc/SOC_2017_FOCUS_Changes_i... (the key quote here being: "In 2016, NYC had 8.2 percent more housing units, 11 percent more adults, and 16.5 percent more jobs than it did in 2000.")

[halpert]

Your sources contradict themselves. For instance, the Furman Center article states that adding luxury housing does not make housing more affordable. The paper from Northwestern states the opposite (luxury housing decreases surrounding rents). Just from looking at the paper from Northwestern, their area of study has significantly lower rents than their control group. It’s not as clear cut as you make it seem. Also, jobs growing with housing supply could possibly be an example of induced demand.

[jeffreyrogers]

Houston's housing isn't expensive though. It has few zoning laws and is not land constrained though (unlike NYC or SF).

[mauvehaus]

There's also an awfully short list of places in the US that sprawl more than Houston.

I'm not arguing that sprawl is inherently bad, but it definitely does add the need to own a car (for most people) and spend a lot of time in it (ditto).