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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   28399 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 23, 2024

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North American housing crises are manufactured. There are no limiting resource constraints. Limited zoning limits the number of houses. Fewer houses means expensive houses. There are other factors at play, but zoning is the disproportionate cause for high prices across the continent.

Canada is facing the worst of it because of the immigration tsunami and a shoddy economy. But, that's like blaming the rain for leaks, when you've got a gaping hole in your roof. Any place in the world would be affected just as adversely, if housing policy was this hostile. Sydney & Honolulu are 2 such examples. It's tempting to think you can trudge along like coastal US cities. But, coastal USA gets around it through sheer brute force. The economies of coastal USA can sustain any level of dysfunction. Be it California's $100b HSR or NYC renting out the whole city's hotels as refugee shelters. Other places aren't so fortunate.

Canada needs to build a shit ton of housing ASAP. The country has practically infinite lumber and just imported a ton of low skill labor. Put up some 4+1s and this will be solved in under a year.

There is no mincing words. Canada's shambolic housing policy is a wealth transfer program from the young to the old. Canada's economy is not doing great, and you'd expect it to affect everyone's QOL equally. Through this (almost direct) wealth transfer, the liberal govt. has decided to let the young bear all the misery, while the geriatrics have the world's greatest retirement.

P.S: I'm Indian and Canada's current immigration policy is a joke even within India. To quote Trump, "They’re not sending their best. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us". India's best don't aspire to go to Canada. They go to the US, Urban India or Western Europe. The OP talks about housing costs and Canada's wider problems with productivity. I'll stick to that. Can always talk about immigration later.

Houston has no zoning. In practice, it has some rules. But the lack of formal zoning limits how stringent it can be- and it comes at a cost. Unlike other cities, where there's a 'ghetto', separated from 'a decent neighborhood' by industrial zones or housing for salt of the earth types, and functionally all the crime is in the former, Houston makes up for its relatively cheap housing with evenly spread crime throughout the entire city, rather than concentrating it all in one district.

There's tradeoffs everywhere. Zoning doesn't exist primarily to screw young people- concentrating low-income housing in one spot has benefits.

Unlike other cities, where there's a 'ghetto', separated from 'a decent neighborhood' by industrial zones or housing for salt of the earth types, and functionally all the crime is in the former,

There's plenty of cities where the ghetto is separated from decent neighborhoods by perhaps one city block or even less. Crucially, you can't ensure that an area becomes a ghetto by building an apartment there, and you can't guarantee an area is high income by zoning it for SFH. There's plenty of single family crack houses in Detroit on sale for about tree fiddy.

North American housing crises are manufactured.

Where (in the industrialised world) are they not?

Houston, Texas has as close to a completely free market on housing as anywhere in the industrialized world- it's still relatively affordable rather than absolutely so.

Singapore and Hong Kong. Small, densely populated islands of prosperity.

Maybe also where a huge number of people want to live in the center of a special city, so Washington or London.

Perhaps New York (meaning Manhattan Island) ticks both boxes.

But maybe Washington, London, and New York combine natural housing crises with manufactured housing crises based on rent controls and restrictive planning laws.

Hong Kong’s housing crisis is also partially manufactured because the construction of new subway / MTR stations is extremely slow and most people want to live within close walking distance of one in a city that gets extremely hot and humid and which has typhoons on a regular basis. There’s actually a lot of empty land in Hong Kong that’s just mountainous (which they’re very familiar with building on).

North American housing crises are manufactured. There are no limiting resource constraints. Limited zoning limits the number of houses. Fewer houses means for expensive houses. There are other factors at play, but zoning is the disproportionate cause for high prices across the continent.

YIMBY may be associated with the Left and all its social dysfunctions and annoyance these days, but the economic consensus on this one preceded the Left's adoption of YIMBY. Pretty much the only dissent you see, academically, is from the further Left, who ultimately wants only publicly owned housing and is offended by the sheer existence of market rate housing and, even then, their work sucks.

A century and a half ago, NYC had more than a million utterly impoverished immigrants dumped on it when the city and the immigrants were vastly poorer than they are today. This was no problem, from a housing perspective: They threw up a bunch of apartments and tenements and housing stayed under 15% of even the very low income of those immigrants.

A century and a half ago there wasn't welfare, was precious little in the way of building codes, and forget about occupancy codes -- the immigrants were crammed into those tenements.

Yep. It can be done, even when we were so much poorer 150 years ago. We could make something safer today, no doubt, for the vastly smaller numbers of people via our overall population and keep it affordable but we have, in addition to much greater wealth, much greater numbers of 'building codes'.

In practice, it tends to be republicans who 'just build shit', though. They choose to screw over trees rather than existing homeowners in most cases, but build housing they do.

Some historically conservative states (mostly in the South) are pretty good about Just Building. Montana is probably the best example of a state which has recently reformed its laws to make it easier to Just Build, and they're pretty much a former red-tinged swing state.

So yeah, not wrong.

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