> The system we have created around real estate and home ownership is optimized to erode culture and atomize community. We like to pretend that this is somehow inevitable, the will of the market, but we need to own it - this is the world we have built for ourselves.
How is it not the will of the market? I don’t see any option other than to limit people’s freedom to move about the city/state/country.
What's pushing people out is the rising cost of property, caused by more and more money bidding for less space. If the government had done more to create more space, prices would not have risen so dramatically.
What if government policy for the last few decades had been to keep housing as affordable as possible. So if average rent in a city started increasing, the government would make sure new apartments and got built and/or expanded roads and public transit to help people live farther away without a longer commute.
> What if government policy for the last few decades had been to keep housing as affordable as possible. So if average rent in a city started increasing, the government would make sure new apartments and got built and/or expanded roads and public transit to help people live farther away without a longer commute.
This would help and is necessary to solve the problem, but I don’t believe insufficient desirable cities or dense cities with public transit is the whole problem. Part of the problem is the ever widening income/wealth gaps, and people will sort themselves and want to surround themselves with as many people in theirs or the next higher up socioeconomic class as possible. So the bigger the divides, the more this is reflected in the neighborhoods, especially culturally.
> What if government policy for the last few decades had been to keep housing as affordable as possible.
> So if average rent in a city started increasing, the government would make sure new apartments and got built and/or expanded roads and public transit
How? Should they...raise taxes? Subsidize housing(and pay for it by raising taxes)? Take from the people who produce much, and give to the people who produce less? I'm not implying it's right or wrong, I'm genuinely curious as to "how" government should go about accomplishing that goal.
Is this difficult, getting approval? I don't live in a large city where the idea of building permits really comes into mind, so I don't have much experience in what could be involved there.
For some contrast, I live in the "rural" US, my home is surrounded on 4 sides by farm fields as far as you can see. This is like peering into an alien bureaucracy for me.
Most of the stress on land comes from exclusionary laws. People with power don’t want poorer people (and especially people of another race) to live near them—attributing their success to their efforts and labeling their own servants as parasites[1] and deadbeats—and pass laws that make housing affordability impossible. Thus, people need to drive long distances to jobs and live in disinvested communities in order to participate in regional economies.
The worst offenders are actually not cities, but the inner suburbs surrounding cities. Cities are filled with guilty settlers who want to help less fortunate people but are unable to let go of the systems of power, while their suburbs are usually created for the purpose of segregation and repeatedly reaffirm their desire for segregation.[2]
Difficult is an understatement. You have to hire the right lawyers who know the right people who can direct you to make the right donations. And if you need a variance, you can 100x the difficulty. It’s a political game, and everyone wants a cut. Not to mention fighting the people who don’t want change in their neighborhoods or congestion on the roads.
And in the meantime, you might also be stuck paying property taxes or fees on a contract to purchase the land that you need extended because the zoning board meeting ran too late and they couldn’t get to your permit.
People don’t understand what it takes to develop property in already occupied areas, and why developers only build “luxury” housing. There’s a reason rents and land prices are high.
> We'd end up with megacities who'd continuously expand and grow denser, swallowing their surroundings in that case, wouldn't we?
I imagine you'd still have the same pattern, just perhaps in more consistent circle shapes. Yesterday's "outskirts" would turn into tomorrow's "upcoming new area" and the people who lived there initially because it was all they could afford would get pushed further out, etc. The three story buildings will slowly get replaced with ten story buildings with wealthier residents, etc.
Constant growth doesn't mean more that in-demand areas won't stay expensive as demand constantly grows too, or that once less-demanded areas will stay less-demanded.
It's not our densest cities that our our cheapest cities. The demand is the underlying factor, not the density. (The density follows the (lack of!) demand for the cheap places.)
I'm not sure how you'd lower cost of living without negative population growth. Try to reduce the footprint of the city but keep the population the same, and you still have just as much money competing for places, so the supply/demand dynamics will keep prices high for the places people want.
Those two things are the opposite of one another. If a city grows denser, the size of its footprint is smaller.
Suppose you create a lot of high density housing in the city. Housing costs decline. People who used to have to live with their parents get their own place. People have shorter commutes.
The population of the city hasn't changed. Maybe if you're the only city doing this then it's a competitive advantage and people move there from other cities to take advantage of the lower cost of living. But if all cities do this then there is no relative advantage and all that happens is that housing is more affordable and people waste less time sitting in traffic.
> Those two things are the opposite of one another. If a city grows denser, the size of its footprint is smaller.
I believe they're mostly complementary. You can't rebuild the city every other year because you have more demand for housing, it's a slow process. The city expands outwards if possible, and at the same time will be made denser when convenient.
I'd love for the whole thing to be Sim City-style "we'll just remove those 12 single-story homes and add a sky scraper", but it's really not. It takes years and years, and it's really impacting the quality of life during those years. I used to live in a part of the city that got more dense housing, and it wasn't fun at all, construction sites everywhere, traffic jams everywhere, and housing prices rising sharply. It might turn out nice in 20 years when they've doubled the density, but it's absolutely not during those 20 years.
It's the property taxes that kick people out. There should be a graded scale that caps how much property taxes can rise in a year. Say 1% for current owners (or at most the rate of inflation). That would slow a LOT of this down. Sure change is inevitable but let people have a chance to adjust.
This is Texas. It has:
- a limit on how much the appraised value of a property can increase per year
- a limit on how much each tax unit -- county, city, etc. -- can increase their levy
- a exemption for elderly or disabled homeowner with even lower limits.
When we have developers building luxury condos amidst squalor, that’s a second-order effect of policies intended to create such contrasts. The market is constrained by the laws.
How is it not the will of the market? I don’t see any option other than to limit people’s freedom to move about the city/state/country.