I'm very progressive in some ways but I do think progressives make this particular problem worse, often with good intentions. Both sides are equally NIMBY but liberals also have:

- More environmental regulations that can be used by NIMBY.

- Attempts to solve the using various forms of rent control, which make it worse.

- Related: conservatives favor less regulation, which leads to more construction.

- Liberals hate for (or at least distrust of) landlords. Some of this is well-deserved but I've seen liberals oppose good policies because it will "help landlords".

Lastly, home owners--including liberals--like to see the value of their property go up and tend to favor policies that make it so. It would be nice if we could get people to stop looking at their homes as financial investments.

See NIMBYs all down the west coast. I bet 90% of city dwelling homeowners would identify as “democrat or further left”, but are very conservative with the character of their neighborhood.

In my experience the bulders and tradesmen who are more right-wing have more to gain from allowing more and faster construction and are more interested in removing laws and restrictions.

A lot of this comes from the attitude in the 60s and 70s where the liberal strategy was to sue the government to stop them from destroying the environment. People from that era saw the smog and the flammable rivers and are generally against development , even though today’s development processes are starkly different from back then.

Right, it's not an inherently left vs right thing. Today NIMBYism has been largely a left-wing phenomenon, with really high end housing developments that are politically untouchable by housing projects.

The answer is always the same tho: make it easy to build housing, and build more housing. Keep building housing until there's a glut of supply.

Can you please give examples of people you consider to be leftist? Kindly, name five "super rich leftists"

It's not even the "super" rich. They don't care what you do. They can afford walls, hedgerows, extra land as a buffer, the finest sound deadening windows, etc, etc, etc. And they can afford to live among people like them so pretty much all that is only of limited relevance to begin with. They make the rules of the game so they make money and their assets go up either way.

It's some jerk who makes $200k who can afford the house but can't afford to not care what their neighbors do that drives all this at scale.

He's the one trying to scheme up some way to get the government to use other people's tax dollars to threaten them if they try and do something he doesn't like, because that's his only lever to pull. And there's enough of these jerks the government(s) pander to them. The result is everything gets stifled and red-taped. Can't run a bar here. Can't have an apartment building there. Can't have too little parking, but if you have too many cars you're running a junkyard, and on and on and on and on. It's these people in aggregate that result in the existing body of regulation of which there always seem to be a few lines that can block any given development.

And then they have the gall to turn around and whine about the sum total of all this. Not enough housing, not enough amenities, what does get built is ungodly expensive.

"man, this park sure is dirty" <throws cigarette butt on ground> "I wonder how it got that way".

Retirees increasingly don't want to live in the empty desert. They want to live in the convenient and familiar places. Except that's where everyone else wants to live too, but since the retirees have the money, the existing land, and the voting power, they're blocking everyone out.

Exactly, building in areas where people want to live and work are exactly what these strategies are designed for. You can't ignore the competing interests in these areas and reduce the argument to "build more".

In this vane, I'm tired of the 'right' pointing out the dystopian and ugly 'communist' or 'socialist' mass housing that the USSR and China did during the Cold War. Sorry about aesthetics I guess? Should be more concerned about Evergrande ghost cities, contemporarily.

> Half-agree: zoning restrictions and non-essential building regulations are a de-facto government handout to existing property owners.

The government represents existing property owners, so they are effectively a handout to themselves for creating and/or sustaining a desirable area. I don't see why things would be any other way.

> At the same time, apologists for rentiers will do anything except taxing unimproved land value (which among other virtues, functions as a vacancy tax to reduce unproductive speculation, and incentivize development).

LVT is a terrible idea. There's a reason why leftists support it, which is that it centralizes control over property values (and therefore control over said property) in the hands of the state.

If you want development, you don't need to incentivize it. You need to just stop getting in the way of it.

IMO, this is largely because the government's job is to stay out of the way, and people who hold elected office in areas where this is a problem (the Northeast Corridor and West coast generally), mostly have a certain something in common that indicates they are likely to think they need to "help" the market along.

It's not a coincidence that the "housing crisis" continues unabated in places like NYC that are losing population, yet appears to be solved in areas in the south that are absorbing those people.

Outside of the major city cores, much of what China built wasn't "housing" in the sense that most Westerners think of housing. The buildings often looked superficially like housing but were never really usable for that purpose. They were more like physical "tokens" used as speculative trading vehicles. Now some of those are being demolished, either due to lack of consumer demand or because the "tofu dreg" construction quality was so bad that they aren't safe to occupy.

Housing prices cratered in China, because, yes, eventually supply catches up and then the ponzi schema has nowhere to go but down. Lots of people hold real estate thinking it's an investment just by itself, so it's been a vicious cycle of prices going up. But if you build enough supply, the market stops treating property that way.

I don't think the Chinese real estate market will ever truly "recover" to the Tulip Mania levels it hit before. Especially with a declining population.

#2 - #4 are really just specific ways of accomplishing #1.

Most people don't want to live in dense urban cores, so #5 and #6 can easily backfire and stunt progress on #1.

Just let people decide what to build where, both as individuals and communities. If dense urban cores truly are the "better" way of living, it will prove itself soon enough without the urbanists trying to force everyone down their path to their own detriment.

Unless this is a very generous approximation, 2.0 is less than 2.1-2.4.

Even setting that aside, homes per capita is not indicative of supply and demand - if everyone in SF wants to live in a house alone, it really won't matter that SF has slightly more homes per capita.

>Also I have limited sympathy for people who move to high COL areas and then are upset by housing prices.

*Move to a high CoL area to get a high paying job, and then are upset by housing prices.

Many people would be overall better off with a lower paying job in a lower CoL area

I'm not going to downvote you, but all of your preferred solutions are exactly the problem. Everyone who thinks more oversight and "support" will fix the problem has their own specific bogeyman responsible for higher housing prices, "bans" it, fails to actually ban it, and then all they have accomplished is that it's now at least slightly more difficult to build housing, and therefore at least slightly more expensive.

> And why would development companies build so much housing that the value started to drop?

Because they have very healthy margins currently, and would probably continue to build if their margins drop from around 20% to around 15%. At some point it would become an issue, but we haven't seen that in the areas where building is keeping up with demand or even exceeding it slightly.

> Are you sure "housing has been built in droves" is what brought the price of rent down?

Yes. What else could it possibly be?

> House prices went sky high because of investors/speculators increasing demand (and massive immigration). Maybe if the government regulated more who buys housing (home dwellers not investors) rather than regulating what gets built. Also, have more sensible immigration levels.

That, plus the many, many artificial restrictions on increasing supply, which actually are the issue. Hint: "speculators" are a tiny portion of the market and aren't leaving homes unoccupied for extended periods of time, and "massive" immigration is also a very small portion of the increased demand for housing. Also, if you want to understand the alternative to population growth, see the Rust Belt in the 1980s.

> Since developers will be less likely to build with falling prices perhaps the govt can build rent to own housing for lower income earners. Or incentivize private developers to build affordable housing.

This already happens. It's ineffective.

> High prices doesn't necessarily mean its purely a supply problem. If profit is high with low supply for developers what incentive would they have to increase supply?

Because its literally how they make money, and new participants in the market are not barred from entry?