[ryandrake]

“because of zoning regulations” seems so vague. Is there a concrete example of what particular regulations are stopping building and how they are doing it? I know people in the construction business and they aren’t hurting for work. In fact they are constantly working to the point where I can’t even hire them to do small repair jobs on my own home. Nobody will even bother to pick up the phone for less than $10,000, there’s so much building going on. And this is California, the most notorious place for (hand wavey) “regulations.”

[topher515]

There are many well intentioned regulations that end up restricting the housing supply by making it more expensive to build. Some of them definitely sound good (and are good?), but collectively have done a lot of bad.

Note the important point here that these don’t “stop building” but rather simply make it more expensive or more time consuming. Increased time is essentially equivalent to increased cost since you must pay lawyers and employees and so forth as time increases.

- minimum parking requirements

- single family zoning restrictions

- height restrictions

- environmental reviews

- historical preservation review

- local input on many/most decisions

There is a whole universe of stuff written around this topic. You can Google around for it with the topic of “YIMBY” or “housing abundance” or similar.

A good entry point can be: https://new.yimbyaction.org/top-resources/

Also read Matt Yglesias and Ezra Klein as they have been harping on about housing abundance for many years.

[strongpigeon]

What I know is mostly from Seattle, but applies in most places:

- Usage Restriction. Seattle is famous for having the highest percentage of land zone exclusively for single family housing. This puts a hard limit to how much can be built.

- Parking Minimum. These can drive construction costs a lot, so much that a lot of projects can't be build profitably.

- Endless "Environmental" review processes. While these do sound good in theory, they have (at least in Seattle) very rarely been used to actually protect the environment. They're typically used by NIMBYs to slow down and delay projects forever so that developers abandon.

There is a lot more, but those are some of the main things people talk about when they point to "zoning regulations".

[hungie]

Thankfully those are mostly going away. Single family zoning is no longer a thing. Parking minima are gone. Environmental reviews are more streamlined.

We still get people being like, "No my neighborhood character is changing!" But thankfully most of them are drowned out by people asking for up zoning and more housing.