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A comment on High housing costs may be California's biggest problem. Parent comment

Re:High housing costs may be California's biggest problem by greenie_beans on Monday May 13, 2024 @10:53PM (#40351197)
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.

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Re:High housing costs may be California's biggest problem by seanmcdirmid on Tuesday May 14, 2024 @02:44AM (#40352304)
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.
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Re:High housing costs may be California's biggest problem by greenie_beans on Tuesday May 14, 2024 @09:52AM (#40355234)
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.

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Re:High housing costs may be California's biggest problem by seanmcdirmid on Wednesday May 15, 2024 @02:15AM (#40363636)
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.
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