[scoofy]

Yes, but not forever!!!

Growth has to happen in the long run. We have the same zoning as we did before the people looking for housing were born.

We can have incremental changes, or we can have sudden change. It's going to happen predictably or with a ton of political conflict. The better solution is always to allow a self-reinforcing pressure release on housing. I've long said that everyone should be allow, by right, to expand their housing by 2x the median building unit within a half mile radius, by units, sqft, and height.

Suburban neighborhoods then slowly turn into duplexes over one generation, then row houses over another, then finally start building up after a third generation. Predictable, fair, and sustainable.

[Schiendelman]

If you make it slow, you cause the same issues - and then the neighborhood just says "well if it's FOUR generations that's not too bad, is it?" And because the people who don't get to move in later don't get a say... it gets worse forever.

It's insidious, but as long as you allow people to regulate how much housing their neighbors can produce, it always gets this bad eventually.

[scoofy]

It’s self reinforcing. When demand is highest, building will be highest, and median unit size will increase more rapidly, allowing more building, allowing more units.

The pace is limited, but the URBAN output increases exponentially, which is exactly what we want.

[Schiendelman]

I wish it worked that way, but from my nearly 20 years of urban land use policy study and writing, I have seen tons of evidence that it does not.

The problem is that the most in demand areas get new buildings at 4-6 stories, and then you get locked up - the airspace above them becomes unavailable for 50-100 years, when there was market demand for some taller buildings from the beginning. It's the same "push down and spread out" that causes sprawl, just more localized.

[scoofy]

I mean, yes, when the incentives are the literal opposite of this policy, the the outcomes will be the literal opposite of what we want.

People respond to incentives.

[bombcar]

It takes an awful lot of incentives to knock down a "usable" structure. I'd love to build higher-density right here, right on my lot, but unless I squeeze something in on the same lot, I'm out $150k just to start. $150k covers quite a bit of gas to the lot 2 miles away that's empty.

[scoofy]

> It takes an awful lot of incentives to knock down a "usable" structure.

Yes, that’s the point. The policy only really changes things when prices become extreme, and the cost per unit of housing becomes completely detached from the cost of building that same unit.

This is trivially happening in much of San Francisco and New York City.

[xnx]

> Growth has to happen in the long run.

This is not sustainable. The good news is that, due to demographic shifts, we might have a glut of housing in 20 years.

[Schiendelman]

Japan is shrinking. Tokyo, however, is growing. It would not be good news if our cities had a glut of housing. We have three billion people of rural->urban shift we still need to do.

[scoofy]

Localized growth has nothing to do with total population.

These urban housing crises in every major western country have nothing to do with population growth and everything to do with population concentration.

We should expect this problem to accelerate during periods of population decline, because there will be even stronger economic incentives to move into concentrated population centers.