Yup -- there was a great article on HN a while back about why zoning in Japan works so much better than zoning in the US:

http://urbankchoze.blogspot.com/2014/04/japanese-zoning.html

TL;DR: You can build housing almost anywhere if there exists demand.

In the US, too, it seems like there's a high amount of empty commercial/industrial real estate. Zoning keeps it from being usable by anything else.

I also often wonder if something like a hybrid employee owned business+occupant owned housing could ever be bootstrapped. Something to function like a small village in the modern era/larger surrounding. But that wouldn't just be a hippy/cult commune.

> In the US, too, it seems like there's a high amount of empty commercial/industrial real estate. Zoning keeps it from being usable by anything else.

Nope, the finance agreements keep that space empty.

Missing rent can generally be tacked onto the end of your financing. Lower rent causes the basis of your finance agreement to change and you will have to cough up cash.

So, owners are willing to let spaces sit empty for years to avoid having to paying cash (which they probably don't have) to the bank.

It's all musical chairs until higher interest rates cause a few failures which cascades through the entire system.

Yeah this is something that can easily be solved by a vacancy tax. It provides city revenue on top of fixing the economic deadweight loss, a double-win from an economic POV.

Good to see SF at least is moving in that direction.

That’s definitely worse.

The government controls zoning and is already negotiating with new developers and nimby's to put in affordable housing