Did you have anywhere in mind that had developers underbuild relative to the zoning? Seems like most urban areas in California at least are already near the limits of their zoned capacity. A lot of the times when you see a highrise standing out on a block its not because the rest of the block is zoned for that same height and is underbuilt, but often because of some special variances permitting that project to exceed what its zoned for on that lot.

good question. birmingham, alabama didn't build enough to match demand, and that area's zoning isn't very strict compared to big cities. i'm curious to know about the zoning laws in nashville and atlanta, but from my tiny bit of knowledge, those places have seen the supply/demand imbalance like everywhere else.

this data point groups together disparate zoning areas like san francisco and minneapolis so it's hard to parse out where exactly it all happened: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/HOUST

this is not my expertise, just something i'm interested in and learned about when i worked on a big project about california's housing. curious to learn more from folks here/find ways i'm wrong.

Birmingham is way off its peak population. It’s under 200k now (still falling) and was 340k in the 1960s. There is probably a lot of hesitancy to build in a place where the population is shrinking.

birmingham is one city in a bigger metro area. when i speak of "birmingham" i speak of the entire metro area, which has grown in population since the 60s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birmingham_metropolitan_area,_...

that stat you grabbed doesn't exist in a vacuum. that stat matches the same time as the white flight demographic shifts that happened in all metro areas in the south.

now do huntsville.

Even if you take the entire metro, growth since the 1960s has been anemic. 300k growth since 1960, and it actually shrunk in 2021 according to your chart. Again, there are much better places to make money building housing, supplies and know how are limited.

No more subsidies please.

what is your solution?

Getting out of the way would help.

snark is not a helpful solution.

That's not snark.

Government permitting is now a huge percentage of the cost of building a house in many US metros. CA is maybe the worst offender.

It's not just NIMBY. State and local governments have gotten exceedingly greedy over the past several years.

Over $100k per door impact fees! Years of entitlement hearings! Years of wrangling for building permits! Any project is a decade and costs a large multiple of its materials.

i'm the op that everybody is being snarky towards. thanks to a project that i worked on, a lot more people are aware of this fact. notably i played a very insignificant part, but you are preaching to the choir!

Yep, going to any Bay Area city council meeting makes it very clear why it’s hard to develop - it’s an incredibly long process to get permission to build. You see the same developers again and again, making tweaks to their plans and seeing if that will appease the council. It seems to takes years.

I’m currently building something in a much more lax area, but even here, the few parts that require permits/inspection are by far the largest hurdles, because they impose a rigid sequential order of operations that have to happen before I can move on, and require a licensed master tradesman to pull the permit, whereas most other things can generally proceed as materials/equipment/people become available.

On your point about local government getting greedy, I went to the state of the county address in our area recently, and the county executive gave a long laundry list of how many millions he was splashing out to x and y, to fanfare for each spending figure, as if the goal was to spend more, rather than get the maximal impact for the dollars. I guess most of the audience were people from those departments receiving the additional money, but as a non-government worker, it was a bit sickening.

I hired an electric company to put in a car charger. In order to participate in the EV pricing program it needed a 2nd meter, which needed a permit. The actual installation was a few hours. The permitting process went back and forth between city inspectors starting in September and didn’t get approved late January. The company didn’t fight anything, always did what they recommended and it still kept coming back with more “issues” and adjustments. The company said they’d never take a charger install job again in the city. It was ridiculous.

Yeah, that sounds a lot like the beginning of this job, the initial plan review for the building permit took like 4 months, and I had to call at each stage in the pipeline to get it moving again. They’re always super friendly, but they don’t seem proactive at all.

I don't see how a contractor could be efficient at all with this setup - I'm assuming they're better at getting things through building and planning, but even if it only took them a couple weeks, they'd need a pretty big pipeline to keep busy, to compensate for all the stalls.

i know. i cited that in my first comment. thanks for reiterating a truth that i acknowledged.

zoning regulations and entitlements are only one piece of the puzzle. a significant piece, for sure.

Gen pop really should try that since they flip out at pols if they change the rules.

To paraphrase George Carlin, politicians come from our neighborhoods and institutions. They don’t cross over from another reality. Society births, educates, and elects them with thunderous applause.

Then refuses to take the blame. Always just “damn government’s fault”.

Propaganda got Americans living inside a prisoners dilemma

Mixed use zoning and anything that can’t weaken NIMBY legislation. It’s all about increasing supply.

The ADU legislation is a step in the right direction.

yep, regulations are only one piece of the puzzle to increase supply. my proposed solution would need that, and would also help increase supply. increasing supply is the the entire point of my idea.