Because "go live somewhere else" is unsustainable in the long run. You have to remember that the time-scale of this crisis is literally just one parent-to-child generation. All of these zoning laws were passed when the boomers were in their prime home-buying age range ('60s-'70s), and the crisis is occurring now simply because their children have effectively nowhere to live.
It's only politically feasible when the folks you're telling to live somewhere else are a political minority, and, to be honest, until the last few years, that's been the the only response. Now that millennials are becoming the dominant political force, it's just not going to fly.
In cities in California they are literally creating company town-style housing for educators and other jobs that cities cannot afford to compensate with enough money to afford housing. Anyone who isn't directly benefiting from the system can trivially understand how inefficient and absurd it is, but the fact is that people who are benefiting from the system are wildly over-represented in terms of active voters. That's obviously changing.
But those cities with housing problems aren’t having those problems due to natural population growth, the cities are definitely growing via from outside immigration (whether in country or not). Their children have nowhere to live because a bunch of richer outsiders outbid them for housing. You don’t here about a housing crisis in Californian cities like Bakersfield or Chico, because their is no demand for people to move to those places.
The worst thing a city can do for housing affordability is simply having a bunch of high paying jobs that attract people to move in. In that case, it doesn’t matter if you build like crazy as in Beijing or Shanghai, or if you have minimal zoning like Tokyo or Houston, housing costs are going to soar because people will want to move there, and you won’t be able to satisfy demand without raising prices.
You speculate a lot in this post, but have zero citations to back it up. I'm explaining the basics of what we should expect to cause a nation wide housing crisis. Unsurprisingly, the housing crisis is nation wide.
>In that case, it doesn’t matter if you build like crazy as in Beijing or Shanghai, or if you have minimal zoning like Tokyo or Houston, housing costs are going to soar because people will want to move there, and you won’t be able to satisfy demand without raising prices.
> I'm explaining the basics of what we should expect to cause a nation wide housing crisis. Unsurprisingly, the housing crisis is nation wide.
A nation wide housing crisis in a few select cities where people want to live? Or a "nation wide" crisis that you can't solve even by moving to Detroit or Bakersville? Because I"m pretty sure I started this with:
> Why isn’t “go live somewhere else” a part of the answer though?
Meaning, we all can't live in Seattle, LA, Portland, or San Francisco, so why make that a right that can't be satisfied? All of these are already dense cities by American standards, and its clear, looking at plenty of examples from around the world, that popular city densities can increase a long time before there is any real impact in the housing market (I don't think any popular city has tried building itself out of its own local housing crisis before...they just give up to the market eventually, or call for a fixed set of winners via rent control or national subsidized Singaporean flats).
You are just refusing to see the obvious. Having lived in Beijing for 9 years and Lausanne for 2 years, I see absolutely nothing special about California’s housing market that exempts it from supply and demand economics that the rest of the world is forced to follow.
> You speculate a lot in this post, but have zero citations to back it up.
If you live in a glass house, it isn’t very wise to throw stones (i.e. you didn't provide any citations either).
It's only politically feasible when the folks you're telling to live somewhere else are a political minority, and, to be honest, until the last few years, that's been the the only response. Now that millennials are becoming the dominant political force, it's just not going to fly.
In cities in California they are literally creating company town-style housing for educators and other jobs that cities cannot afford to compensate with enough money to afford housing. Anyone who isn't directly benefiting from the system can trivially understand how inefficient and absurd it is, but the fact is that people who are benefiting from the system are wildly over-represented in terms of active voters. That's obviously changing.