However there’s no reason to think that would fix it all, transportation planning, design, and funding is almost entirely a state and federal affair, and the nimbys still torpedo all sorts of things that would be great for the region at the expense of a particular neighborhood or block.

To some extent though, that’s a feature of democracy, not a bug. There are a bunch of reasons we’re in the mess we’re in, and federal programs and subsidies contribute a lot. The threat to take away federal funding for places that don’t accept housing growth may be more effective than a brute force approach in the end, who knows.

I believe this is similar to the approach the feds used to move the drinking age to 21 [1], and the old nationwide 55 mph speed limit [2]. They didn't force states to create laws, just said "Federal highway funding will be drastically reduced to states that do not meet X" and magically, this was done.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Minimum_Drinking_Age_...

2. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/07/four-ti...

The amount of propaganda that would be pushed out to crush any changes to zoning would be on historic levels.

Renters are a growing political force.

Renters (often under rent control) are NIMBYs as well, don't understand or are convinced that supply and demand don't apply to housing.

This is a very SF-specific view of the world. :)

Rent control is specific to just a handful of locations and is often subject to statewide restrictions (e.g. Costa-Hawkins). In general, renters are less inclined toward NIMBYism. This is especially true for the younger ones, who don't benefit as much from RC even in the locations where it exists. And even rent controlled tenants don't like the fact that they can't move.

So, if it's “almost exclusive” to any pair of states, it's New Jersey and New York, not NY and CA.

(The source is also inaccurate in at least one respect, in that NY by the description given on the page and CA due to Costa-Hawkins both meet the criteria for a “Yes” in State Prohibits or Preempts Rent Control column, but both have blanks in that column.)

Depends on how home rule is set up in that state's constitution.

Because of strategic (cynical?) choices over how voter registration is implement, tenants have far less power at the polls.

But my point is that, suppose you are a low income neighborhood and the state naturally wants to blow up your houses to put in a freeway — because they know they can’t get it put through the rich neighborhoods. Shouldn’t you still have the right to fight that?

Ex: https://www.strongtowns.org/shreveport/

Would it? I feel like this has Commerce Clause uber alles written all over it.

In other words, don't ask me. Ask SCOTUS. They've used the Commerce Clause to justify regulations on activities that were far less obviously about interstate commerce than zoning is, most famously in Wickard_v._Filburn, which restricts a farmers right to grow wheat on his own property for his own consumption, which, according to the court, is indeed an example of interstate commerce.

My statement, in other words, has nothing to do with my own interpretation of those rulings. It's merely an acknowledgement of them. It's not difficult to think of ways in which local zoning restrictions affect national commerce. And that's been good enough for the Court in the past, it seems.

The constitution limits the authority of what the Federal government can do in the US and delegates everything else to state and local governments.

This HUD effort would be more minor, something like removing some zoning restrictions in order to get federal dollars. The existing political entities (probably cities) would then have to pass those rules to get the money.

Just because the restrictions on this are not in the federal Constitution doesn't mean they don't exist; just as the federal Constitution has rules on State-Federal power balance, State constitutions often have rules on State-local power balance.

State Constitutions are usually procedurally easier to amend than the federal one, though, so, the barriers, though real, are smaller.

I wonder about a state law creating a new type of township that is totally subordinate to the county (dissolving all functions of the township). Would it be a good thing? What are the pitfalls, etc.

It's not like housing would become more affordable anyway, Seattle only builds luxury housing for the rich (and they're having a hard time filling these units!).

They only build luxury housing because housing supply is restricted and the rich can outbid the poor for that restricted development.

And no, they aren't having a hard time filling units.

Seattle Times says otherwise.

https://www.seattletimes.com/business/real-estate/free-amazo...

Apparently in Boston contrary to concerns luxury high rises didn't act as gentrification locuses but stemmed its tide in other areas instead.

I wish. If that was true I'd be much happier with politics than I am.

Except that, AFAICT, didn't happen. (Though there is a current challenge to the Constitutionality of the Medicare changes, among other things.)

You may be thinking of the mandatory (for continued state participation in Medicaid) expansion of Medicaid portion of the ACA being made optional rather than mandatory by the Supreme Court.

Of course, one could argue that is an example that is arbitrary and, while it certainly evidences judicial limits, is hard to connect to it's Constitutional pretext, as it explicitly requires that both pre-expansion Medicaid are post-expansion Medicaid are Constitutional federal programs, but that Congress is somehow barred from replacing one with the others except by consent of the individual participating state.

It's folly to compare zoning rules when the spirit of the law is so different.

However, YIMBYs only want half of that -- they want Japanese zoning, with American infinite appreciation. Which is disastrous to basically everyone who works for a living.

I'd appreciate a source on this. Most self-identified YIMBYs I've met in San Francisco would be ecstatic if housing prices stabilized or fell – in fact that's one of their primary objectives.

Vocal YIMBYs I've met are either (1) young people who don't own property, for whom the current stratospheric prices are out of reach, or (2) employers who have to convince those young people to come and work in the Bay Area, despite the unbearably high cost of real estate.

I'm certainly not arguing that some markets need resetting, but as parent says, this isn't what the people who want this want. They'll sell progressively crappier and crappier property because that's what property markets will bear when unregulated.

The only way to depreciate without lowering quality is area decline. Sounds awful but I honestly think some places need this. If they keep growing, keep sucking in high paid jobs, the lower classes (that the upper classes need) won't be able to afford to live where they need to.

You might argue that it might become self-limiting based on what the market will bear... But looking at London, and the awful living conditions at the bottom end of the market only confirms that once you have critical mass, and people need to live somewhere, vendors and landlords can get away with murder and somebody will still chuck money at them.

Also, Japan is NIMBY at the national level, as in "not on my island". For instance, accepting few refugees.

Smart in other ways, not just the zoning, you see. They protect their culture.

People are racist and xenophobic, we know that. It’s not xenophobic to point out that, within a democratic framework, peoples’ racism and xenophobia, coupled with a hetrogenous population, could make it difficult to implement policies that more homogenous populations implement successfully.

For example, one mah argue that our justice system is strongly influenced by racism (an uncontroversial assertion, I think) and that’s a major reason why our voters prefer harsher sentencing and more aggressive policing than in Western Europe.

Would you care to provide some substance to this claim? You're tarring over a hundred million people with a very nasty brush.

But I would agree that Japan is generally racist, as in most Japanese believe there are fundamental differences between people due to what they call race. I am not sure whether most Japanese would consider Korean a different race, but I would not be surprised either.

For an example of how this affects who can live where and how where one lives affects non-residential opportunities, you can read up on burakumin (a disfavored heredity pseudo caste). Burakumin status still exposes one to highly non-trivial societal discrimination, and is primarily observable based on “Have you or yours ever lived in a burakumin neighborhood?” This makes e.g. historical maps which mark out burakumin neighborhoods into socially contentious informational hazards; Google Maps had to take them down after a (utterly well founded) fear that at least some employers and schools would cross-reference neighborhoods with current or historical applicant residential addresses and then go full Harvard University on them.

Similar observations can be made about ethnic Koreans, Japan’s rapidly growing population of long-term resident foreigners, etc.

The actual numbers are not known because they aren't collected as part of the census, but the government estimates that upwards of 98% of the population is "ethnically" Japanese. Furthermore, many of the ethnic Koreans that you mention, as well as ethnic Chinese (the next biggest group, as I'm sure you already know), are culturally fairly assimilated, even if many are second class (non)citizens in the eyes of laws and much of society.

A major factor there is the lack of cars (and higher buildings to wall out car noise from highways) compared to where I live, but even so people are just quiet. It was weird for a while, but coming back to the states I really miss it.

So it helps, but it may not account for all of it.

All of these factors (and more) result in the housing economy you see in Japan. HN people love to fixate on zoning, but it's not even close to the whole story. If we suddenly asked westerners to live the way Japanese people do, there would be open revolt and riots in the streets.

There is one thing they all have in common: they all allow housing supply to meet demand. Anything else is a distraction.

That's like "fixating" on the money supply. Sure, having more of it lowers prices. The point is: how do you get there? What are the side-effects of your proposal? These are not simple questions.

Fixating on zoning, at the exclusion of all other considerations, is a facile answer.

Japan is proof that zoning doesn't have to represent a restriction on housing supply. But don't just dismiss Tokyo because you think other cultural factors are at play: Montreal, Chicago, Dallas, Calgary, and plentiful other US/Canadian cities have confirmed what Tokyo has already taught us.

Chicago city average really hides the fact that the places most people would consider living in Chicago aren't super cheap; still cheap-ish when compared to other coastal cities

I have seen numbers compare rental price of 1/2/3 bedroom(s) in Tokyo to New York [1,2], but I do not trust those numbers, because they do not have the size of the apartment. I think it really matters, because apartments in Tokyo could be much smaller than those in NYC. I don't have a statistics for this, but there is an example [3].

OK. I found a table of comparison by sq instead of # of bedrooms [4].

[1] https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?cou...

[2] https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/one-bedroom-apartme...

[3] https://www.lifewhereimfrom.com/lwif-x-ep4-what-is-an-averag...

[4] https://resources.realestate.co.jp/buy/average-rent-in-tokyo...

There is no city like it in terms of population density. It is literally NYC + LA + Chicago, the largest 3 US metropolises, combined.

It would make more sense to use a remotely comparable city for comparison, like Osaka (still larger than any US metro)

No, it doesn't matter to most people. A country with smaller apartments will have smaller appliances, smaller computers, etc. - like Japan.

- movement into few urban mega-centers (you can't even say "into cities" because there are plenty of cities with little or even negativ population gain)

- immigration (e.g. see https://www.reuters.com/article/us-germany-immigration/immig...) -- and they mostly want into the already crowded areas, of course

- aging population needs different homes than young families