When people don't know many facts about an issue but it affects them personally they rely on ideology to form opinions. e.g. They follow what other people on team red or team blue think. Or just apply a pre-conceived notion of regulation being the solution, or de-regulation being the solution. Hence you get counter-productive conclusions like new supply in the form of new luxury apartment construction being the cause of rent inflation.
The dumb thing is that the market WOULD solve the problem if it was allowed to. We have a dysfunctional system with too many regulations but instead of the regulations getting blamed, the market gets the blame instead. And the problem never gets solved.
> The dumb thing is that the market WOULD solve the problem if it was allowed to
Not only do you not have a way of knowing that for sure, history would indicate otherwise.
Housing is fundamentally a good with limited elasticity, therefore the market on it's own without a good dose of regulation could easily become disastrous.
For a historical parallel, take a look at what happened in industrialising countries when the market was the one making decisions about housing where it was needed (next to the newly appearing factories/otherwise urbanising areas). The result was people living in horrifically cramped and squalid conditions (alongside other fun ones such as company towns) which was literally one of the main inspirations for socialism and communism.
Regulations on housing are a must, but their impact needs to be carefully managed and offset with appropriate incentives, policies and subsidies to make sure housing is of good quality (nobody should live in asbestos and lead paint filled pods under a highway next to a chemical factory) but abundant.
"You're not allowed to build an apartment complex out of paper" regulations are not the main thing driving costs today. "You're not allowed to build an apartment at all" regulations are. End height and density restrictions.
I'd go with relax over end, because surrounding infrastructure still needs to scale with the amount of people living there, and having very dense skyscrapers next to low height buildings is not great from an urbanist perspective; but there's nothing stopping most American cities from upzoning to 8-10 floors, and upgrading transit and city infrastructure to match the increased density (you're going to need more internet, water, sewer, electricity but nothing fundamentally unfixable).
IMO, when we reach those limits if rents still don't tick downwards because the demand exceeds the market's ability to respond to it we're just going to go through another even more insufferable version of the argument I originally posted about except people will dig their heels in _even deeper_: "density didn't solve anything!"
I absolutely DO know that for sure. I personally tried to build more housing, by actually buying land and building housing. I ended up not being able to because of single family zoning.
Just say you personally want to go out and solve the housing problem, what is stopping you? Like you can just go buy some houses, tear them down, and build more densely. You will definitely make money. That was my thinking and I was prepared to put my money down to make it happen. I was stopped at the planning stage by zoning.
I was under contract to buy land and started the planning for building. I had an idea of how many buildings I wanted to construct, where they would be laid out and was starting to get permits. So I went to the city to start getting approved for permits, I was told by the employee at the city planning department that that was not going to be possible and that the maximum number of homes that could be built on this lot was exactly ONE. Even though the lot could have easily held 5 single family homes, it was zoned for one house.. Meaning that the planning department would automatically decline my permit application based only on the fact that that land had been designated for one house instead of five. That's what "single family" means here. It had nothing to do with the quality of the buildings or their layout.
So I thought that was ridiculous and asked how I could get around that, I was told that I would have to go to the city zoning commission and either get the lot rezoned or get a variance (special lingo for an exception). She laughed at me and said that that was very unlikely to happen.
I went to the zoning commission meeting that was held monthly. Can you guess who runs that commission? Homeowners from the area! Guess what they did not want me to do. Build more housing! Those people do not want to see the character of their town change, they don't want to see anything change. The people in charge of determining what gets built in cities are the people with a vested interest in keeping supply low to maintain their investments. And the thing is that when these zoning laws were set up the cities all basically just copy/pasted from one another, so they all have the same system with only small differences.
Needless to say, I backed out of escrow, did not go through with buying the land, and learned a very valuable lesson about how housing works in the US.
This is a separate issue from building codes. The building standards in the US are determined by codes which have nothing to do with zoning and can be as stringent as one likes.
You will be amazed at how much of the city is single family zoned. Meaning that it is required to be super low density and that even if a developer bought all the houses in a neighborhood they would not be allowed to build any more densely than what is already there.
Isnt it also related to utilities? I mean if you have laid water/sewage/power/gas/telco infra for a one family home, and someone builds a structure for 5 families how does upgrading all that infra work?
At this point, I think civil disobedience is the solution.
Uber fixed the taxi industry (and then started taking a cut for itself) by just flouting the law -- until it had a fait accompli that most people liked.
The same thing will have to be done with housing, by people who have the resources to do it.
The problem is, it's difficult for this to be a grassroots civil-disobedience thing. That's called building a favela. Though honestly that could work too.
What the example of the favela (or, before that, the homeless camp) highlights is that property is as much about security (violence/force) as about construction. The camp can always be bulldozed. That's what a lack of property rights actually means, materially. I don't know how one provides security in a civilly-disobedient way.
The closest thing I can think of to what you’re describing is the van life movement and sleeping overnight various places without permission.
Or, taking it up a level, living in an RV somewhere in a gray area of legality or where there’s little enforcement (such as the RV’s on El Camino Real in Palo Alto)
It's both though. People who have managed to maneuver all the bureaucracy and have approved plans in hand are having a hard time finding construction crews with any available time.
It's the 'stop hitting yourself' of housing policy.