There's an obvious solution here, it's just not one most people living in these areas wants to hear.
All these ill people have doctors around them, which also can clearly be linked. That in itself doesn't seem to be an argument.
(Note I'm not taking positions here, I don't know enough about the topic)
Taxing improvements to land makes it less likely that people will build or renovate, so all such taxes should be removed. Taxing land, however, disincentivizes landlords from holding land idle.
Regulations are also important.
If there is a mandatory minimum amount of parking that must be provided, then it becomes that much harder to build more units, even if you are near transit and most of your tenants don't need cars.
If there are height restrictions, restrictions on mixed-use development, restrictions on the number of units allowed, and so on then these will likewise cap the amount of supply.
The reason people support things like rent control is "I've lived here my whole life but I can't afford rent anymore because it keeps going up."
It's not perfect because it is basically a subsidy to owner occupants so it won't help suburbs become denser. However, it disconnects the impact of taxation on home owners and commercial developers/investors which means home owners will be more willing to tax developers. The one benefit is that large scale development will naturally consider denser housing because they want to optimize their tax burden.
However, with respect to affordability, a key complaint across the board, LVT does indeed help by reducing the amount of speculative holding and removing tax penalties for improvements. Under LVT residents will be able to afford better accommodations for less money. Particularly if other onerous policies are removed such as rent control, building restrictions, parking mandates, taxes on demolition, and the like.
A media that is very "concerned" with housing shortages where rent control is concerned suddenly loses its concern and gets overly concerned with crime, delinquency, public debt, etc. when a solution that brings down property values is mooted.
Raising property taxes will also help as it will act as a disincentive to use land unproductively or as a store of value.
A more feasible option is to let private developers (who collectively have access to trillions in capital) to finance housing creation for rich/middle class people, and rely on government subsidies for low-income housing.
Obviously the solution is that you should've built two luxury towers. However, people watching the situation sometimes get the counterfactual wrong and conclude that if the luxury tower hadn't been built, none of the rich people would have moved to the area. They then conclude the best idea would be to build no new housing at all and do everything they can to make sure that is the case
https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/working-paper/2019/uk-house-...
When people talk about how raising interest rates lowers the cost of housing what they really mean is that interest rates lower the value of income streams derived from monopolies and land is the biggest monopoly of them all. Monopolies basically can do perfect price discrimination, the more money you have, the more the monopolist can charge. Thus the obvious solution of giving people more money doesn't seem to work.
Raising interest rates is basically the opposite. What if we take everyone's money away? If people have less money the monopolists will charge lower prices. This didn't really solve the monopoly problem. After all, the monopoly allows perfect price discrimination. If the monopoly power is strong enough to get 30% of your salary it will always get 30% of your salary no matter how high it is. What really happened is that you now have less money to buy non monopoly goods.
Here are the practical implications: You can spend $1000 per month on your mortgage at 5% interest or -5% interest. The -5% interest house is significantly more expensive but the monthly payment is still the same. You still lose $1000 no matter what you do.
The places where this is not true are all places that have seen significant population growth and have not permitted sufficient new construction. For example, in Jacksonville, FL, the median home costs $250k, which would leave a payment of ~29% of the median household income in Jacksonville using a 5% down payment. Similar math works in other cities where builders have been allowed to keep pace with population growth.
Portland does still have high rents, so it’s hard to point to this as a “success”, but I think it’s a good template for how you can encourage affordable units without putting the whole city under tight rent control.
I’d be delighted to be proven wrong, but it seems unlikely.
For example, not everyone can afford San Francisco, but there is a lot of buildable land besides SF in California (the Central Valley, for instance). Everyone should be housed, but it’s likely it might not be their first choice.
All cities need janitors, teachers, baristas, grocery clerks, garbage collectors, etc. in order to function, and those people have to live somewhere at least within a reasonable commuting distance to the city. You can't have all the garbage collectors move out to Bakersfield and have San Francisco _just_ be a citadel of software engineers, unless the software engineers haul their own garbage, or the garbage collectors in SF also get paid $100k+ per year.
The teachers, janitors, baristas, etc will move to the location that gives them a better quality of life. If they decide that's not San Francisco, they can move to a better city. If SF wants them back, SF can sweeten the deal for them.
I guess it's kinda sad that not everyone who wants to live in SF gets to, but I'm not sure how "closing the door" is any more fair.
Which (as I understand it) is kind of the topic of this whole sub-discussion: it is not easy to find a solution which will sweeten the deal for them (aka: make it economically feasible and attractive for low/middle income people to live and work in a city with a housing shortage and high housing costs). Rent control is one such proposed solution. It has its benefits and drawbacks, of course, as evidenced by all the debate about it here.
Then you either pay very high rates for basic labor or you push the government to build cheaper housing. It all fixes it self.
Rent control would be one such measure. Other examples are loans with better-than-market terms for certain privileged buyers, publicly-built houses sold at lower than market rates and so on. The market reaching equilibrium for everyone and the local government saying "sorry, but screw you" to buyers is at least honest, if a little heartless from the voters who live there.
I suppose it's fair enough as long as other markets with decent job options are available elsewhere. If not, I would classify it as a failure of democracy if a significant portion of society has no better option than to pay most of their productive output towards rent. This probably varies a lot by location; San Francisco wouldn't be the first example I'd use. Maybe Oslo.
People per square mile: San Francisco: 17,246.4 Brooklyn: 35,369.1 Manhattan: 69,467.5
If demand ever reaches that high then the market will move to a new equilibrium.
Speaking of Manhattan:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/01/nyregion/manhattan-vacant... (Office Vacancies Soar in New York, a Dire Sign for the City’s Recovery; Nearly 19 percent of all office space in Manhattan has no tenants — the highest on record — as companies shed leases and embrace remote work.)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-12-05/even-befo... (Even Before Covid 2,600 People a Week Were Leaving New York City)
It makes no sense to reserve city space for single level buildings.