I would like to see this, at the national level: federally strip all downzoning from urban cities, then increasingly tax single-occupancy houses, focusing on subsidizing and activating high-density housing for all income strata. There's no reason Seattle, San Francisco, LA, etc can't all be turned into high-density high-efficiency Manhattan-esque locations. With the increased density comes a more effective tax base and a better scale for urban services.
For existing owners, they will get a huge payout because their land becomes MUCH more valuable. The downside is that certain neighborhoods where supply is most suppressed will change very much, very fast, and the people that don't sell and leave will probably not like that.
Preferences aside, this cannot be done without hugely disrupting municipal finance, primarily the provision of public schools. Residential property and services are subsidized by commercial/industrial tax revenues, and there is no linkage between assessed value of property and number of school-age children (e.g. two empty-nesters in a mansion pay multiples of the property tax of a family of 5 renting an apartment). And that's just operations! Building lots of new school capacity, when land has just become very expensive, is not something existing cities/school districts are equipped to do.
However, Americans are tough and smart and can figure stuff out. These are just the current obstacles that exist.
That's what we've been doing here in Australia to deal with a housing crisis; now there's a looming oversupply of apartments [1], and a lot of them are barely habitable "dog boxes" [2][3] built as investment assets (rather than, you know, for living in) while house prices are still sky high.
[1] http://www.domain.com.au/news/australia-to-have-too-many-hom...
[2] http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-08-14/melbourne-dog-box-apar...
[3] http://www.macrobusiness.com.au/2016/03/melbournes-dog-boxes...
But these very same owners are the ones blocking such construction, even despite being the same people that will receive a financial windfall; they prefer to keep the neighborhoods as is even at this tremendous opportunity cost.
So, it still requires some eminent domain or overriding local government.
UNLESS: The municipality becomes the 'building'. If you have parking silos at the edges (or in dedicated locations within), and excellent human scale transit (like people mover belts through commercial areas) between there and housing then I'm more for /centralized/ parking.
America is simply built on cars, and no matter how much you get rid of the need for a car in the city (and PLEASE reduce that as much as possible!) the car is /the/ interface for accessing the rest of the world, where families, lower density industrial, and other aspects live.
If you want to go out and access parks and other features that involve more trees, more natural animals, and less people that is also a requirement.
The key problem is that these zoning decisions are occurring at the local level, where petty biases and NIMBYism plays out - shoving externalities at the neighboring cities is par for the course.
We could call it, "The great leap forward." Or maybe, a "Five-year plan".
Certainly the locals shouldn't have a say in what the feds do to their own cities.
In fact, zoning is what is keeping people from building the kinds of buildings that people who can't currently afford living in city $X from living in city $X. Does one particular unit of government deserve more respect than all others?
Washington already exerts too much influence on far-flung localities. This is the last thing I want to see - people who live in a place should be the ones who set the rules for that place.
I lost all sympathy for that argument when it was part of the key rationales for redlining and keeping the blacks out of town in the 1940s & 1950s.
Thank god for democracy.
In the Bay Area, you see what happens when the supply runs out: the middle class becomes renters for life.
...Real estate has been a boon for some in the middle class, but it's important to consider the wider implications of speculation in land values as a source of wealth-- it's ultimately unsustainable and highly regressive.
If it's genuine, how the heck would you get support for something like this? It'd be the ultimate NIMBY.
YIMBY, actually: NIMBYs are the folks who don't want to have development nearby.
League of Urban Voters: we would work together to draw up a workable plan for the next 12 election cycles (or so) - the LUV would accept members and donations from all who support the goal of increasing density and urbanization. Key congress people supporting the goals would be identified, along with professional city planners and professionals at universities. Supporting cast members would be industry groups and other coalitions that we find common cause with. We would collaborate with them to develop talking points and in-depth policy wonk analyses, policies, and plans.
After we had hammered out the key policy points and major reasons to shut down the pro-single-occupancy house policies & pro-suburb policies, we'd go onto the campaign path, understanding that it'd be a 48-60 year battle. There'd be a blog, a forum, probably eventually a think tank and a journal. Given a careful orchestration over the timespan of two generations, a reasonable success would be had.
There's no God-given right to live in your own home on an acre of land in the US. Or in a 120-story skyscraper. These capabilities are hammered out through politics, engineering, and money. If the sociopolitical scene is tuned to have cheap houses, it'll have cheap houses. If it's tuned for condos in skyscrapers, it'll be condos in skyscrapers. This genuinely is malleable stuff here.
N.b., this is not unique to housing policy. You can define the same general game plan for any particular issue you like.
At least many of them started valuing a yard, easy access to a car, and better public schools after they had children.
"The federal government will no longer provide security for single occupancy house mortgages"
"The federal government finds that policies preferring in any sense single-occupancy homes gives clear rise to racism. The Equal Housing authority will be auditing all sales and rentals of single housing homes; landlord violators will be fined severely; mortgage lenders who violate will be fined severely".
Also, with the demographic shifts in the US and how they affect urban areas, it's absolutely relevant to the nation's commerce.
Anyways, you can tie HUD/DOT/etc grants to the conditions. Don't play ball = no funding.
So while you have a point from a purely anarchist point of view (and that's not a slur on you, ok? anarchists have a great critique of existing systems), that ship has sailed so long ago in the first world that I don't think there's any meaningful point in trying to recall it.
IME these people are universally poor communicators in the much more important text medium.
Small towns are awesome if you want to live a mostly self-sufficient life. For most people, who want cheap crap dropped on their doorstep every other week, food coming from hundreds of miles, cable TV with 300 channels and fast internet, they just mean more roads, more trucks, more driving, more heating, more pollution.
It's not black and white. It's not central Manhattan and the middle of Montana.
[ADDED: And, by the way, my town was founded in 1653. It's not some recent suburban sprawl addition.]
You mean the septic tank, well, and solar panels? Plus the dirt road? Frankly the only infrastructure you really need is the high speed internet connection.
We used to talk about things here, on the internet. We're doing it right now, in fact. I've had far more stimulating discussions with people here, and other places on the web, where you can draw people not just from one provincial area, but from the whole world.
That last sentence does not sound like an argument against this approach, but an additional argument for it. If there is a secular trend of urban rents outpacing inflation, it sure seems like a "better late than never" situation.
There are real physical limits on the ability to create supply. Even after cutting red tape, developments need to be reviewed, and there are limits to the pace of reviewing and limits to the amount of trades available to build the approved buildings. As the article states construction takes time.
In a high demand environment, for example in a speculative housing bubble, demand could dominate the ability of a city to create new supply. In this case you can add more supply, but it won't halt price increases. You can't change the balance and create more affordable housing without also taking action on the demand side or by subsidizing in some form below market price housing.
A real world example of this would be Vancouver, which has consistently added supply over the decades, and currently has more housing starts than at any other point in the last several decades, and yet was continuing to see spiking property valuations. The Provincial government finally gave in and took action to limit demand, enacting a 15% tax on foreign purchases.
The likely outcome is that they won't, and here we are.
My city is awash in luxury apartments and condos with 10 year tax abatements. They'll suck the life out of existing nice developments, and then every little LLC holding company will be bankrupt when the tax man comes back.
Dense construction is more expensive per unit area. So even if you could spread out the cost of expensive land among many units, a high density building will cost more per unit to build. Shrinking living spaces can only be taken so far before they hurt quality of life.
So city dwellers will always pay more per unit area because of building costs.
Second, traffic from density imposes costs on transportation. So movement is more difficult in a dense environment.
Eventually, these costs overwhelm the networking benefits of cities, and dispersion is the result. This has already happened with industry, which requires more space than services to be profitable. We are now seeing the service economy priced out of the Bay Area, leaving only the rentier economy.
Density is not a panacea.
haha what? no. Suburban sprawl and car oriented transportation systems are dramatically more expensive than denser communities where you can viably walk, bike and take public transit. There are all sorts of studies on this.
Consider how expensive it is to walk 15 minutes to work for example. (it's free)
Driving is slower (traffic jams, traffic lights, crossings everywhere...).
Public transportation is slower (think train and long/middle distance busses vs local busses and subway and tramway with their stops every few hundred meters).
Cycling is slower (same as for cars + the repeated effort of restarting after every slow down or stop + damn paint and gutter plates everywhere that should be avoided or ridden with care).
Heck! even walking is slower (pedestrian 'jams' slowing you down, avoiding people, traffic lights, crossings every 50 or 100 meters, cars/trucks parked on sidewalks...).
Basically, what's fast and efficient is a point to point transport with 'emptyness' between the nodes. It's not being bogged down on a dense axis or area.
And yet many will pay, because the benefits of cities are desirable.
> Second, traffic from density imposes costs on transportation. So movement is more difficult in a dense environment.
There may be an absolute limit, but with well-executed transit, the density of cities can offer mobility options that less dense communities could not begin to consider.
> Eventually, these costs overwhelm the networking benefits of cities, and dispersion is the result.
I agree, but in my take, that's largely because cities are artificially expensive owing to the speculative value of land-- you simply can't build better transit because the cost of land rights would be gigantic. You can't afford to build denser apartment buildings because homeowners enforce restrictive zoning to protect their land values...
It's exactly correct that this all benefits rentiers. But I think the right solution is better land-use policy which directly targets rent.
In practice, however, we are so far from anything remotely resembling a natural limit on the benefits to density that we will see a lot of improvements by freeing cities to become more dense. Removing the artificial constraints on growth imposed by anti-growth nativists will do a lot to improve affordability.
Toronto (average $/sq ft to build given range) Medium Quality Tract House (assume 1 story): 180 Medium Quality Highrise (50-80 stories, average 65 stories): 270
This comes out to $1.38 more per square foot for each additional story.
Let's just assume land will be twice as expensive in the city center as at the edge of that metro. Assume the cheapest land is $200 per square foot.
Assume that the house will be built on the cheaper land, and assume one dwelling per story for simplicity.
As you add a story, the cost of land is halved. After adding the 65th story, it is divided 65 ways.
By adding the linear curve of building cost over the inverse curve of cost of land divided by story, you get the cost per square foot per story. In fact, this is maximized for a single-story building as land costs are born by a single tenant. Cost per floor falls until construction costs overcome the falling cost of land.
The minimum cost to add a story, $214.67 occurs for the 12th floor.
Again, back of the napkin and very naive.
A highrise will probably have less square footage per dwelling though. If we halve that the cost of land falls even faster, with building costs plus land costs bottoming out at $203.51 per square foot, for the 8th floor.
Finally, I added an $8,000 per square foot premium at city center. With this, the cheapest floor costs $348.44 per square foot for the sixth floor.
So as land prices become steeper from city center to periphery, it actually makes more sense to disperse. Likewise reducing dwelling size does not have as much of an effect as rising build costs.
In this model, the Bay Area becomes a glorified version of Sand Hill Road...cozy offices for a very few at the top...and every other facet of industry pushed out to affordable areas.
Its critical to learn healthy urban planning methods so that the child cities that later run into this problem have a solution other than moving on.
More practically, the width of even wide streets like Geary is narrower than the depth of a typical SF building - see https://goo.gl/maps/YbJmqxpgEW62. Roads overall take up a huge amount of space in a city, but no single road is all that much area. For instance, it looks like the right of way on Geary is about 110'. If it went the full length of SF (~7 miles), then the whole road takes up less than 100 acres. For reference, Park Merced is 150 acres.
It would be great if all the lightly trafficked side/residential streets could be squished from 60' to 40', you're talking about 50 blocks -> 1000' width, which is over 3 blocks wide and about a thousand acres, which is approaching the size of the Richmond district (and that's just if you squish in one direction). But you can't just pinch-to-zoom in real life :(
Yes. NIMBYism is entirely about public policy. The fact that the land in question might be publicly owned is irrelevant. If anything, publicly owned land should be more subject to NIMBYism. Public land does indeed belong to the citizens.
[1] one reason why many of us are hopefuly that the Internet will increase our contact with others around the world with radically different upbringings and world views from our own, helping us understand and empathize with one another better.
There are plenty I wouldn't bother saving in a life-threatening scenario, and they're perfectly normal people that I just happen to have fundamental disagreements with.
That said, I think we are witnessing the effects of your ethno-emotional proposal -- we are all forced to confront each-other's differences as we all come online and the world is convulsing. The internet is amplifying hatred and fear rather than dispelling it.
People will simply just move as close to opportunties as possible and that will drive prices further up.
This is why cost of living is going up not down. For all the great things technology does it doesn't solve one of the most fundamental needs of humans.
