Everywhere I look in my area we are building new housing. But more people keep moving to the desirable locations with jobs etc.

EDIT: I live in one of the 10 fastest growing metro areas of the US. In the last 4 years my county added over 60,000 homes but about 130,000 new people moved here. I drive around and see new development after new development. But more people move here because of the good jobs, schools, etc.

I can drive 2 hours away to some economically depressed areas. Houses are a lot cheaper because the population moves away to the bigger cities for jobs, education, etc. So sure you can have a cheap house in an undesirable location.

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epistasis an hour ago | parent | next [-]

There's a huge disconnect between perceived amount of building and actual need for housing, in my experience. People are used to seeing nothing, so when even a single building goes up they think it seems like a lot.

In my downtown area, there has been a trickle of a new building with a few hundred apartments per year for the past four years, and people are freaked out at that tiny amount of new housing in a city of 50,000 people. in reality we need at least double that amount of housing per year, but that small amount has people shocked and thinking we're building way too much.

It's been far too normalized that we shouldn't build housing, and it's hurting society at a very deep level and causing massive inequality while blocking access to opportunity.

	▲	majormajor 35 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		This is also the cause of the gentrification anger and resulting NIMBYism. If you build some, but not enough vs what's actually needed, you get both: - expensive new market-rate construction that most people can't afford - localized bumps in rent for increased relative desirability - overall prices that continue to rise across the city because the new construction was just a drop in the bucket compared to the need And then it's easy to point to "they built that building AND our rent went up!" as a reason to oppose construction, even though in the long run they'd go up even more if that building wasn't built.

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jvanderbot an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

"We" in GP was the previous generation, not a nefarious evil cadre. The prior generations followed jobs to highly desireable areas, affordable only because they had the expertise and education to get the high paying job in the first place. Every person that moves there lifts the ladder a little higher behind them just due to market factors.

I feel that only works so long. Without new emerging areas offering high wages and decent cost of living, the new grads look at the old areas like SF (no hate just e.g.) and see a financial bridge too far and a tight job market anyway.

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epistasis an hour ago | parent [-]

The only reason SF seems inaccessible is that the prior generation down zoned and said "no more housing here, we don't want growth." Which worked out well for them but robs young people and immigrants of climbing the same ladder they climbed.

Building new clusters of expertise and economic opportunity is extremely hard, nearly impossible, everybody has been trying to replicate the Bay Area's tech success for decades and even with the housing problems it simply hasn't happened anywhere else.

It's far easier to remove the law on the books banning housing than it is to build an ecosystem of any economy from scratch in a new area.

We don't need any new cities, we need to allow existing areas to grow. If every city blocks housing, then even that new area is going to be blocked from growing as it grows.

We must stop everybody in their tracks that thinks it says "I don't want new housing or neighbors near me" because that is the literally robbing of our young people and of society of opportunity.

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majormajor 25 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

> The only reason SF seems inaccessible is that the prior generation down zoned and said "no more housing here, we don't want growth." Which worked out well for them but robs young people and immigrants of climbing the same ladder they climbed.

I'd add more nuance here, SF and many of the surrounding areas said we don't want population growth but they didn't say they didn't want economic growth. And that's a nasty combination for cost-of-living because if you have new higher-grossing, higher-paying businesses displace older ones, you're going to see a crapload of residential displacement and housing inflation.

SF didn't want to be Manhattan residentially, but they didn't do much to try to avoid being Manhattan industrially.

People who rented in SF got screwed because of that.

People who owned property didn't. They made out wonderfully. They kept their property, with the existing characteristics in many places so that they still had a nice big SFH instead of living in a condo like in Manhattan. And the fact that it's worth ten times as much is hardly a downside to them!

Sure, that plot of land would be worth even more if you could build a giant tower on it, but that increase in value is much less marginally useful or desirable to them than their home and neighborhood staying more or less the same shape.

If you want to change that, you have to be really specific about the incentives and the motivations of the current players. "Economic growth" as a sales-pitch alone doesn't resonate against entrenched non-financial NIMBY interests. Or necessarily promise anything to change the property-owner-vs-renter power imbalance.

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cucumber3732842 28 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

The problem (edit: "a problem") is that this down zoning is basically state and federally enforced.

Temecula would happily grow but they can't just repeal their laws and say "go for it" because in order to get their citizens tax money back in the form of grant money (with strings of course, because that's how grants work) they have to have these laws because these "we will mandate parking, and then we will create beurocratic hell for anyone who wants to pave anything" in order to check some sort of "municipalities shall implement..." type law.

And it's not just the clean this or that act, it's every goddamn issue and area of regulation.

So basically SF not only gets to eat its cake, but it gets to prevent every other city in the state from doing something drastically different from what they're doing.

And you can run this example in any state, just change the cities. And it happens federally too.

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majormajor 14 minutes ago | parent [-]

> Temecula would happily grow but they can't just repeal their laws and say "go for it" because in order to get their citizens tax money back in the form of grant money (with strings of course, because that's how grants work) they have to have these laws because these "we will mandate parking, and then we will create beurocratic hell for anyone who wants to pave anything" in order to check some sort of "municipalities shall implement..." type law.

> And it's not just the clean this or that act, it's every goddamn issue and area of regulation.

> So basically SF not only gets to eat its cake, but it gets to prevent every other city in the state from doing something drastically different from what they're doing.

> And you can run this example in any state, just change the cities. And it happens federally too.

I don't think you can run this example in any state.

Maybe Mansfield, TX; or Waxahachie, TX (both south of the DFW metroplex) would love to grow. And there's not much stopping them regulatory-wise there. Yeah, car infrastructure and parking is necessary, but that's literally true everywhere within a few hundreds of miles, and isn't really restricted at the state level or by geography anywhere in the area, including the places like Frisco or The Colony on the north side of the Metroplex that have grown like crazy in the last 30 years.

But the Metroplex "proper" - which now includes the popular new surrounding cities - has gotten a lot more expensive over the same time frame.

There's a demand aspect that means some places can build into the growth, and others can't. What's the old saw? Location, location, location. There's all the land in the world to grow outwardly in the area, but it doesn't happen uniformly in every direction, and it hasn't prevented rising costs in the popular areas. It's less acute than SF because the raging single-family-zoning NIMBYism isn't accompanied by being landlocked, but the combo of NIMBYism + popularity/demand constraining where new construction happens mean that supply hasn't kept up with demand. And the money you'd save by living somewhere else, for many, doesn't justify giving up the location they want, so those other areas don't have a strong economic case for growth (why invest in a project there instead of a project on the north side?).

(THAT part is universal, and part of why I wonder just how much Temecula would actually want to grow: would growth just look like Riverside or San Bernadino? Folks with means aren't choosing the inland locations first... and unlike in TX, the weather is enormously different.)

	▲	bombcar 9 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		> Maybe Mansfield, TX; or Waxahachie, TX (both south of the DFW metroplex) would love to grow. And there's not much stopping them regulatory-wise there. Yeah, car infrastructure and parking is necessary, but that's literally true everywhere within a few hundreds of miles, and isn't really restricted at the state level or by geography anywhere in the area, including the places like Frisco or The Colony on the north side of the Metroplex that have grown like crazy in the last 30 years. I still think the solution involves rapid transit (which could be cars maybe) - you need the outlying towns where there is space and room to be directly connected to the economic centers in a way that makes them practical. Then the area that is low density can grow - connected to the city center but not contributing significantly to vehicle traffic.

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hdgvhicv an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

So there’s tons of empty housing? Why are people building new housing then, is it just that much better quality that the empty housing is the old crap?

	▲	ironman1478 an hour ago \| parent [-]
		All the empty housing is not near where jobs are, you could make the houses dirt cheap and if there are few jobs then they're actually relatively expensive to the population. Also, yes lots of housing has unbelievably expensive deferred maintenance and many sellers are trying to act like their homes aren't huge money pits.

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peab an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Yeah.. In Texas, there is loads of housing, and loads of affordable housing.

In Canada - not so much