> So you’re saying regulations are blocking new home construction. Got it.
Oh come on, new home construction is doing just fine ... but the homes are 5600 sq ft, $2+ million and 30-40 minute drive from city centre. And it's not regulation requiring it, developers prefer to build condos and monster homes because the ROI is much higher. Regulation is allowing it.
> What you describe is exactly what people mean when they say you “can’t build housing.” In reality you kind of can but only a few homes and only at the very high end.
New housing starts in the US[1] have climbed steadily for the past 10 years until inflation and interest rates in 2022 caused it to drop.
What you are saying is not happening. Maybe some housing development you wanted to happen got blocked, but we ARE building new housing and when we do stop ... it's not regulation that stopped it.
[1] https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/housing-starts
Whenever a dense block of housing is proposed, people abuse zoning regulations here to shut it down. They add on tons of extra costs (mandatory parking etc) and then complain about how much the houses cost.
Go look at your city and see if it's actually legal to build a new mid rise apartment in the city center. I'm guessing, if it's anything like every city I've ever lived in, it's not.
We might just be disagreeing on terminology, there is a difference, in my mind, between regulations that require something bad to happen and regulations that ALLOW something bad to happen. If the regulations ALLOW something bad to happen that's a "lack of regulation"
> Go look at your city and see if it's actually legal to build a new mid rise apartment in the city center.
This might be a US vs. Canada thing ... we are building mid-rise and high-rise in multiple cities around me right now: Toronto, Kitchener-Waterloo, Cambridge, Hamilton, Burlington.
What we are NOT building is a lot of apartments. Developers want to build and flip if they are allowed to.
This is good, but even at the peak in 2022 housing starts were lower than they were 20 years ago. Given that the population has grown significantly since then, housing starts per capita effectively never recovered from the 2008 recession.
The point is, you can be frustrated about zoning laws being abused for protectionism by people who want to increase the value of their asset by limiting what can be done by their neighbors, and not immediately go off and claim the actual problem is that people are freeloading off the government and that regulation is keeping the "few people" who want to work from rising to the top.
So you’re saying regulations are blocking new home construction. Got it.
What you describe is exactly what people mean when they say you “can’t build housing.” In reality you kind of can but only a few homes and only at the very high end. You can only build at the high end because of density limits and zoning and also because complicated regulations and battles with NIMBYs increase costs. When the cost to build is high only big luxury homes can be profitable. Lower margin per unit affordable homes and apartments can’t be funded.