That doesn’t explain why it’s so hard and expensive to build things. We built those suburbs in the first place when we were much less rich as an economy. Indeed, we built all the water and sewage and electrical infrastructure all over the place too.
In the 50’s these were mostly empty range land, or timberland, or farms, or swamp, or whatever. One (or just a few) owners, low property values, little to no political/environmental resistance - relatively easy to buy someone out and develop.
Now? HOAs, tons of urban zoning rules and environmental rules, thousands of stakeholders for any sizable project.
Which also now means more stakeholders, more political resistance, more BS if you want to increase density there. Or building in not-so-easy places, like steep hillsides, more remote locations, etc.
Most of the existing folks don’t want change. In 1950, especially out west, there essentially were no ‘existing folks’. Even the natives had been wiped out.
And as an economy, we were used to building things at a war economy pace, and had reasons to continue to want to do so.
Now everyone would rather blame someone else (or ensure they get their sizable cut) rather than do anything about it.
As the boomers slowly die out and assets change hands, the momentum will change. Eventually. But we’re talking about a decade plus.
Then it will be the millennials turn to be the ‘bad guys’.
Ultimately, these empty homes are investments and sometimes investments fail, and if they're big enough sometimes those failed investments cause people to lose a lot more than what they invested. That's literally the definition of investment risk. We can't keep doing status quo with this shit while the market continues to sail further and further out of reach of all the people who actually need what it's selling.
It won't fix everything, of course, but it will give us a much more normalized market to then attempt further reform on, rather than the current one which has more in common with a casino floor than a market.
For one, the city did not "ban housing investors," they banned some investors from purchasing a subset of homes, which is already weak, and only made weaker by the fact that the first study analyzes only a few months of market activity under that new restriction.
That being said, both studies do indeed conclude that a link cannot be established with certainty between the policy and house price reduction.
> Results from the difference in difference analysis show that the null hypothesis that the policy effect on home prices and days on the market is not significantly different from zero cannot be rejected. This means that it cannot be concluded that the buy-to-let restriction reduced housing prices or increased the days on the market.
However, this is one city, not in America notably where the problem is at it's worst, and they did not restrict lower income housing which is the most liable to be outbid on by private investors and rented, so I would hardly say these two studies by themselves utterly disprove anything in the way your dismissive comment implies they do. I don't think a partial restriction on a housing market in one metropolitan area out of the roughly ten-thousand currently on the planet is definitive proof.
One thing that has definitely not helped is hostile building codes that prevent density. In some cities in the US, building height is constrained by the nearest single family home. Then there’s the parking minimums for buildings that allocate more space for parking than for building space for people.
In Austin, TX (USA), you frequently see buildings with massive amounts of multilayered parking but a smaller fraction of the building used for residential or commercial space. Some “clever” developers have tried to disguise the parking structures as part of the building itself to hide this fact from public view.
Problem with America is that we think this is 1950 and we can scale by building more deadass suburbs, expensive regional highways, and further strain our limited pool of resources (water, sewage, electrical infra) to support suburban living without any consequences.