Re:Facing housing crisis, L.A. voters back duplexes in singl...
by AnthonyMouse on Thursday December 02, 2021 @12:37PM
(#29419457)
> You don’t want high density housing in your city? Fine, cap your employer zoning.
The political incentive is to do the opposite. Make it cheaper and more attractive to employers, then make residential housing scarce. You get huge demand for housing, then employers have to pay more (generating more income tax revenues) even though all the money goes to landlords, then landlords have to pay more in property taxes. From the perspective of the self-interested government bureaucrat, this is the system working as intended.
> Nobody needs to use land “efficiently” by packing more people into it.
Except that then things are more spread out, and what you're using inefficiently then is transportation.
If you have a twenty story building with shops at the bottom and housing at the top, anyone in that building can walk to any of those shops, or any of the ones across the street.
There is enough land that we could build all of that stuff across a hundred square miles, but then everybody needs a car. And many people don't want that, but restrictive zoning prohibits the thing they do want.
The political incentive is to do the opposite. Make it cheaper and more attractive to employers, then make residential housing scarce. You get huge demand for housing, then employers have to pay more (generating more income tax revenues) even though all the money goes to landlords, then landlords have to pay more in property taxes. From the perspective of the self-interested government bureaucrat, this is the system working as intended.
> Nobody needs to use land “efficiently” by packing more people into it.
Except that then things are more spread out, and what you're using inefficiently then is transportation.
If you have a twenty story building with shops at the bottom and housing at the top, anyone in that building can walk to any of those shops, or any of the ones across the street.
There is enough land that we could build all of that stuff across a hundred square miles, but then everybody needs a car. And many people don't want that, but restrictive zoning prohibits the thing they do want.