Interested to see how it shakes out in Portland, we put in infill laws a few years ago and I've seen a handful of multi-family additions on previously single-family land, and even a handful of trailer or tiny homes setup on driveways (this was approved in the infill laws). And it does seem like nobody is super happy because the neighborhoods are losing a lot of their classic aesthetic. But IMO we need to let go of that eventually, otherwise everyone just has to move out to suburbs and fill that space instead (which is also happening).

I feel like this is part of the problem every time these housing affordability conversations come up. The problems are hyper-local, but the proposed solutions are advanced as if they need to be state or even country wide. A lot of "we" statements that don't actually apply to the audience. And to people in areas like where I am, or in semi-rural areas that are dying and the housing prices are falling, it just seems ridiculous and hyperbolic. And that isn't to say we don't have problems here. I have plenty of younger co-workers who are facing down where and how to afford living in this area as housing costs have grown immensely over the years. But "stop only building 4k sqft homes" isn't even remotely the right solution here, because that isn't the problem here.

Imagine if we suddenly got a bunch of articles on HN about the "website affordability crisis" and it was a bunch of FAANG engineers and ex FAANG employees and want-to-be FAANG employees talking about how you can't build a reliable website for less than a few million in cloud services and monitoring and logging from Datadog and the like. Sure from their perspective of trying to build a FAANG scale service that might be true, but it would also seem insane to the rest of us who are wondering what's wrong with throwing up a few boxes in a colo center or even a few basic EC2 instances and a cloudflare proxy if you just want some affordable website hosting.

Not every IT problem or company needs Google scale solutions, and not every community (or even community suffering from a housing affordability problem) needs Seattle scale solutions either.