[dheera]

No. If you want affordability, make the government efficient and tax people LESS.

The government steals half of my money, half of my landlord's money, and I have to pay my landlord’s income and property tax in addition to my own income tax.

This is why I still cannot afford a home even though I work in a senior role in AI. After paying all those damn taxes and everyone else’s taxes there is almost nothing left.

[lufenialif2]

I’d imagine it’s less taxes and more you want to buy a nice house in the Bay Area where a lot of people are high earners and would be driving up prices on the low supply.

[enceladus06]

Yes and for some weird reason, the bay and all the nice places to live are all single-family and expensive as hell. Just build some soviet or Chinese style apartment blocks and give people housing like Singapore does its not that hard. This is not a democrat or republican issue, it is a have versus have-not issue.

The logical conclusion is that the residents of these desirable areas like the bay / San Diego / Seattle / DC actually want housing prices to stay high.

[lufenialif2]

Building giant apartments would change the vibe of the Bay though, and my guess is some of people who want to live there also want to live in it as it is now and not what it would be with high rise apartments etc. There’s probably a way to do it well, but it’s a pretty heavy lift versus doing nothing, which is the current status quo.

Also doesn’t help there’s a lot of red tape as the other commenter mentioned.

[ajsnigrutin]

I mean.. some people would prefer to live next to a forest or grassland, but nope, houses were built there, because people needed somewhere to live. Now that's not enough, and larger buildings are needed, and that includes socialist buildings.

I live in a former socialist country (well, part of a country, the country does not exist anymore), and when we needed more housing, we designated the land in the city to be for housing, ie. large socialist buildings. Then 1990s came, no more socialism, capitalism now, and no more large building projects, no new neighborhoods. So now, we have cows and cornfields in what would be prime realestate because the government won't change the zoning, all three neighbors there complain and apartments that used to be 120k eur maybe 20 years ago are now close to 500k eur.

If you want to live next to cows, move to a village, thousands want apartment buildings there, to live in a city.

[potato3732842]

>its not that hard.

Repealing all the bullcrap from the last 50yr that makes that artificially expensive to the point of being a non starter if not outright illegal is the hard part.