[mmsimanga]

In my country in Africa there is a huge shortage of homes in cities where building is regulated. Not enough homes are being built and many people live in shacks. Building in the villages has literally no regulations and amazing houses are being built at an amazing pace in the villages because you don't need any regulatory approval.

I don't think all building regulations should be put aside but we have a crisis something needs to give.

[dmix]

I've often wondered how much of the western homeless crisis is due to not allowing ghettos/slums to exist, the last place the very poor could afford rent. Cities have essentially made them illegal over the past 30yrs. Once it gentrifies it's gone. Including even large blocks of subsidized apartment buildings https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cabrini%E2%80%93Green_Homes

All housing is now very carefully planned top-down. The only ones who get past all the red tape are high end condos or far-off single-family suburbs. So city government's only idea is to force each of those fancy buildings to have a subset of units as affordable housing. The supply of those is never enough to keep up. Government made buildings now take forever or straight up fail.

Out of sympathy they removed an option for the very-poor and haven't come up with a replacement solution.

[kalaksi]

> western homeless crisis

Haven't really heard about this crisis. Are you referring to the US?

[card_zero]

Global, I guess. It has a wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Housing_crisis

There's specific pages for some individual countries, too:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Housing_crisis_in_the_United_S...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affordable_housing_in_Canada#A...

[purple_turtle]

This one is about housing crisis, not "western homeless crisis".

At least in Europe it is not (yet?) causing very large scale of homelessness problem.

[vladms]

I find the name "housing crisis" misleading, because if I look at average floor area per capita, I think we should call this "expectations changed faster than buildings". For example https://doi.org/10.2908/ILC_HCMH01 (variation between 43 to 141).

[pixl97]

I'd say it's a bit more complex as you have to deal with capital financing and a number of regulations like parking in cities that lead to issues.

[arjie]

This is primarily an anglophone board so they are (perhaps inaccurately) referring to the Anglosphere which has far worse housing performance than elsewhere https://www.ft.com/content/dca3f034-bfe8-4f21-bcdc-2b274053f...

[SpecialistK]

The US and Canada (and to some extent elsewhere) have been experiencing a lot of homelessness and open air drug use due to fentanyl, housing unaffordability, and "community" mental health treatment rather than "mental hospitals."

[dmix]

US, Canada, Australia[1], Ireland [2], and many other places.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c9vg923vkdko [2] https://www.irishtimes.com/ireland/housing-planning/2025/03/...

[ernst_klim]

Berlin, London, Amsterdam, Stockholm all have it.

[card_zero]

In rural Gabon, presumably I wouldn't be renting but would own my own unsafe shanty. It's really tempting. But living in Libreville has more of a ring to it.

[delusional]

> Out of sympathy they removed an option for the very-poor and haven't come up with a replacement solution.

That doesn't seem like a fair take. You're implying that the sympathetic people who outlawed poor houses are the very same people who won't build anything new. That's not true.

[pie_flavor]

What? It's literally the same regulatory agency in this case, and more broadly it's the same ideological strain of banning doing X without also doing undesirable thing Y and not caring about whether that reduces the rate of X. Unless you are talking about the housing developers themselves, in which case you are falling for the same thing yourself.

[delusional]

"Ideological strains" arent people, nor are "agencies".

Democratic politics will always be about compromise. Compromise means you don't get do all your Y's. It's the purpose of the system. We will never (I hope) live in either the libertarian nor the socialist utopia, not just because neither of those places really exist, but also because democracy doesn't lead to that.

If you every find yourself thinking that "this problem would be solved if only we were closer to my utopia" then you're the ideological one.

[pie_flavor]

I didn't say 'utopia'. I can name exactly the things I want changed, and exactly what the proximate effects will be of doing so, good and bad.

Yes, agencies are people. If you think that it's dishonest to castigate the SFHA for taking one action and not taking another because the one action was a little while ago and therefore there's been some personnel churn since, you are being unserious. Have you ever complained about past and present actions of e.g. Microsoft?

[sophrosyne42]

The problem is zoning and building codes, which combine to effectively ban ghettos.

People generally don't realize how much of the regulatory apparatus in the US comes from racist origins.

[throw_m239339]

Making people live in slums/shacks isn't a solution to the western "homeless crisis".

This website has been often prone to "social justice" recently, I'm amazed somebody can get away with such an idiotic comment without being flagged to hell.

Houses are "carefully planed" because you don't want poor people to die in them due to poor construction, carbon monoxide when they need heat during winter, or a fire that would spread to other houses due to cheap materials, that's why,you know, the stuff that happens regularly in third world slums, but you can't fathom that fact.

[fff123qwerty]

Housing regulations have nothing to with protecting the people inside them.

They are there to outsource inspection costs to tax payers for the banks to protect their loans on the houses themselves.

And help nimbys protect property values.

And create more bureaucracy for former contractors as most inspectors are.

And reduce competition for existing contractors.

And increase revenues for housing materials retailers.

Housing regulations have zero benefit to the people who live in the house or don't live in the house because there aren't enough houses so people die in the cold.

[dmix]

I'd be happy with just allowing more low/middle-market housing development which is what eventually seeds low income housing. I don't think anyone's calling for more slums but rapidly building houses and less aggressive urban planning is the only way to solve what is easily the #1 social problem here in Canada and many parts of the US/Europe and Australia.

"Slums" in the west are mostly just old apartments that used to be middle class or cheap buildings in less 'desirable' locations. They aren't people living in shacks.

In a housing shortage those old buildings which would normally decline in rent still cost $2000/m in many cities like Toronto due to lack of supply. And no developer can afford all the headaches just to build a new affordable low-rent buildings either.

[throw_m239339]

I have a better idea to solve the western "homeless crisis", tax your salary and capital gains much more to finance affordable public housing construction. That way, nobody dies in some hazardous shack you think should be allowed to be built by slum lords. Done.

Your "solutions" are so cynical you really want homeless people to die.

[dmix]

> tax your salary and capital gains much more to finance affordable public housing construction

I would have taken that position when I was younger so I won't be too critical. But IRL trusting centrists politicians to spend that money properly and actually build mass housing is mostly a pipe dream. They can't even build a single railroad in the country let alone hundreds of thousands of houses in the city proper.

Radicals rarely take government for long... and as long a capitalism is the only true wealth generator for the public I wouldn't gamble on the far-left being the party that achieves that rare feat (absent a dictatorship).

It's easier to just campaign for government to do less instead of more. Just let people build things they need. There's already massive pent up demand and private capital ready to build housing the second government lets them. It doesn't need risky advertising for more taxation.

[baxtr]

This outlines the problem with most regulation:

There is no/litte discussion about the trade-offs.

You have to see the other side, then weigh all pros and cons and then make a decision.

In most cases regulation is sold as something that will improve a field with no downside at all.

That’s just a lie and people find out over time.

[jltsiren]

There is no shortage of political debate in most developed countries.

I think a bigger reason is that people who go to politics or administration often succumb to a certain kind of (reverse) teleological fallacy. They think that because their goal is to advance X, if they propose regulations for that purpose, their regulations will advance X.

[delusional]

Sure, western politics doesn't discuss the problem of regulation. Sure, sure, sure.

Do you live in an alternate universe? The last 30 years have been dominated by deregulation and privatization.

[purple_turtle]

> The last 30 years have been dominated by deregulation

Maybe in USA, and not everywhere. From what I heard deregulation had not happened in USA healthcare.

And describing last 30 years in EU as dominated by deregulation is clearly wrong.

[energy123]

> deregulation

Any word that conflates parking minimums with food safety regulation is counter-productive. These two things are so vastly different that they should never be discussed in the same breath.

[Gibbon1]

I think a commonality is none of the agencies in the way feel an existential risk from failing to execute.

You could imagine a system where a permit and planning department finds it's functions taken over by a minimal state agency when not enough housing is built in its area. The state of California is slowly moving that direction because it's so bad.

[TylerE]

Which just leads to things like this

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/feb/15/earthq...

[mmsimanga]

Typical structures in the villages are bungalows built by people you know. Sounds like the crisis in the link you shared is from corrupt approvals and poor construction of commercial properties sold to people. People build houses they will live in in the villages and for me this is a big enough incentive to build it properly. You will have no one to blame when your own roof falls on your head. The builders are also known and it would be a business ending move to build a rubbish house for your neighbour. Word would get out pretty quick. One thing people do in the village is talk as they have plenty time. I think all these other factors make up for the lack of regulation.

[rippeltippel]

I think the point is to avoid roofs to fall at all: that's what anti-seismic regulations are for. They saved countless lives in places like Japan. They may not prevent all deaths, but can be an effective damage containment strategy. When an earthquake devastated the Italian city of L'Aquila, the majority of the survived buildings were those following regulations. Many houses built in the Middle Ages are gone.

[delusional]

One of the earliest known laws humans created (almost 4000 years ago) state that if a homeowner is killed by his house caving in, the builder must be put to death. We have known since forever that you can't just let people build shitty structures.

Letting the free market take care of it isn't natural or neutral. It's literally never been how human society does things.

[card_zero]

The Code of Hammurabi. https://archive.org/details/hiddenrichessour0000hays/page/13...

Probably wasn't a list of real laws? So says Wikipedia: "Rather than a code of laws, then, it may be a scholarly treatise."

There's zero equality in it. Killing a commoner is cheaper than killing a noble. If the badly built house falls on a slave, the builder owes the owner a slave. So if the free market is an innovation like equality, and is not natural, well, fair point I guess, and natural isn't necessarily good. But was Babylon natural, anyway, or just old?

The notion that the free market is natural means something. I suppose organic is the real idea there, and that makes it just another appeal for using local knowledge as opposed to insensitive central management.

[nickpp]

Actually building in Turkey is strongly regulated - it’s just that corruption in government allows bad players to easily ignore it.

Just another way regulation fails to do what is supposed to, while its downsides (diminished competition, deterring startups and supporting incumbents) still apply.

This is why blindly relying on regulation and ignoring its trade offs is just foolish.

[TylerE]

When the officials are nearly universally corrupt, the regulations de facto do not exist.

[nickpp]

> the regulations de facto do not exist

But they do exist. Their downsides still apply. They will keep intimidating and burdening the honest players and deterring prospective startups while completely failing to stop bad players.

They will even encourage corruption: obey heavy regulations and controls or simply pay a tribute to the ruler.

[TylerE]

Read more in depth into this catastrophe. There were for all intents and purposes NO honest players. In some towns 90%+ of buildings collapsed, when code compliant ones would not have - it wasn’t even that strong an earthquake.

FTA: “ According to numbers published by the environment and urbanisation ministry in 2018, more than half of the buildings in Turkey – equivalent to almost 13m buildings – violate construction and safety regulations.”

[anovikov]

It's regulated everywhere it's just that corruption networks are so dense in the countryside, no one gives a damn about things being done legally.

[mmsimanga]

In my village there is no regulation for building residential property. You don't have title deeds either. You get allocated a piece of land by the local chief or headman/woman and you decide where and what you can build. The only regulation is you must have a toilet. Which tends to be a no brainer and one of the first things most people build. A simple Blair toilet.

[anovikov]

This is same that i meant myself. Local gang so established, it is seen as a government itself, runs the place and national laws do not apply, resulting properties being from perspective of law, illegal - can't be officially sold or mortgaged, have no title deeds, and would have been razed if government had access there, except if a city official with a bulldozer appears, the local gang will meet them with machetes and pitchforks, and sending in tanks and helicopters is not worth it. It's not "deregulation", it's "lawlessness".