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A comment on The Impact of Zoning on Housing Affordability (2002). Parent comment

Re:The Impact of Zoning on Housing Affordability (2002) by closeparen on Tuesday February 27, 2018 @11:06PM (#16480605)
Upzoning creates multifamily housing. To many, that is not really housing, it's something for other people. The younger, the poorer (in suburban areas), the richer (in gentrifying urban neighborhoods), the transient, the childfree. Upzoning will encourage the demolition of single-family detached homes, which in their mind is the only kind that real families care about. Even if you can get someone to acknowledge that greater supply will make condos cheaper, affordable condos don't offset the increasing cost and scarcity of backyards. To be forced into a tower is as bad as being displaced entirely.

Developers aren't helping the matter. Multifamily buildings in America are too often cheap and hastily-built crap polluting the suburban landscape, or gleaming ultra-luxury alien invaders menacing vulnerable urban neighborhoods. It might help with sentiment if we had more multifamily buildings that were pleasant to live in and that middle-class voters could actually identify with.

I'm as YIMBY as anyone, but the actual recent condo buildings I can point to are making it hard to challenge the preference for single-family homes. Anything that looks as good costs twice as much, or more with HOA fees.

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Re:The Impact of Zoning on Housing Affordability (2002) by ocschwar on Tuesday February 27, 2018 @11:30PM (#16480683)
WHo exactly is being forced into a tower? I have a detached house with a small yard, a short walk from a block lined with condo buildings and one rental building.

Nobody's being forced into my neighborhood. The working class homeowners have been pushed out of the houses by yuppies like me long ago. Now they're being pushed out of that one rental building, which has been remodeled, and where they've stopped taking Section 8. And they're pushed out by people who for whatever reason are quite happily packing themselves into these buildings.

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Re:The Impact of Zoning on Housing Affordability (2002) by ajmurmann on Tuesday February 27, 2018 @11:34PM (#16480703)
I think this is in the very least partially a result of a broken market. Due to regulations and zoning you can barely call development a market. It takes lots of effort and ideally connections to build something. Meanwhile it's largely a seller's market. If we dramatically reduced zoning restrictions we could get much closer to the market doing its work and maybe have some real competition.

For example where I live so malls get built by the same developer. Even if someone wanted I'm sure it would be nigh impossible to get permits etc. to build a competing mall next door and try to drive them out of business like in a real market. I'd love to see real, break neck, free market competition for all projects and no schmoozing with the major.

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Re:The Impact of Zoning on Housing Affordability (2002) by DrScump on Wednesday February 28, 2018 @02:10AM (#16481289) 

  Multifamily buildings in America are too often cheap and hastily-built crap
I'd like to see your data on that, but if that is true, that would support the NIMBY case: "I don't want 'cheap and hastily-built crap' next door!"
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