> Impossibly unrealistic to change zoning to disincentivize car-dependent urban design?

Those zoning issues are the same reason for any number of other problems, including housing prices that are supposedly the #1 concern for a huge number of voters, and yet voters in many cities have only doubled down over time on making it harder and harder to build in efficient and high-density ways. "Impossible" seems like a fair way to put it.

Yet some cities are making progress on exactly that issue.

I haven't done the statistics on it, but I'll bet cities full of people who want zoning reform are more likely to reform than cities full of people who do not want it.

No city has implemented anything like zoning reform. There are a handful of cities which, to great fanfare, have made tiny changes. Minneapolis has made the most impact, but it's hard to rule out correlation with falling demand for that city.

Raleigh doubled its zoned density overnight.

They did not. They allowed duplexes and townhouses in some places that were limited to single houses (https://www.newsobserver.com/news/local/counties/wake-county...).

This change ultimately allowed something like 10% more units in the city on a 100 year horizon.

This is what I'm calling out - these changes sound big but they are nearly meaningless. Cities need periods of explosive growth to remain affordable (see Jane Jacobs, 1961 and 1970).

Please cite each of those 10% and 100 year numbers.

You can read the text change. It allows duplexes and ~doubled the allowed density on almost every residential zoning type.

What makes you think that the changes made will increase relative to baseline by more than 10% increase in housing stock over 100 years?

Lol the onus is not on me to rebut what appear to be numbers made up from whole cloth.

Kind of, but you're implying Raleigh's changes will have more impact than that. What makes you think so?

I said "Raleigh doubled its zoned density overnight." You said "No they did not" and "No city has implemented anything like zoning reform." Both of these are false.

You can refer to the text changes. They doubled the zoned density in nearly every residential zoning type in the city. It is a huge change, though I suppose you can claim that's not "reform" if you want. It is sufficiently reformative for my purposes of increasing urban density over time.

Changes will take time to kick in, and obviously they should take time to kick in because simply clicking a button and doubling actual built density would crater the economy. It makes no sense. The zoning change removes an artificial restriction on the natural supply/demand curve, so now supply can grow as-needed in the forms desired.

I don't think it really does to the supply/demand curve what you think it does.

In general, when new construction occurs, it's taking low density and replacing it with more like 10X density. A very tiny amount of land gets developed at once, so you need each new development opportunity to generate as much supply as possible.

What this did was make people think gosh, that means a lot of housing! But in actuality, very few of these ever get built. Only very old housing stock ever makes sense to replace with only a doubling.

I appreciate what you're trying to say, but what I said was actually true. This won't have much impact. I can give you drips and drabs of information this way to help you understand how development works, but I can't give you an entire primer, unless you'd like to get on the Zoom and talk about it for a couple hours.

Maybe true in an area that requires redevelopment to grow, but in Raleigh there are huge, huge swaths of totally undeveloped land that are now much more valuable even within the same zones. You do not need ultra-high density towers to create true urban density.

I think you're setting up a false premise there about towers? Not sure where that came from.

Can you show me land that is now much more valuable than before? I suspect the places you're thinking of aren't really changing on value or buildability the way you expect.

> In general, when new construction occurs, it's taking low density and replacing it with more like 10X density. A very tiny amount of land gets developed at once, so you need each new development opportunity to generate as much supply as possible.

Naively, you're talking about converting a one story building into a ten story building. That == a tower.

You're skeptical that higher density zoning increases land values?

> Now, let's talk about the multi-family sector. If you thought single-family homes were hot, wait till you hear about this. Land suitable for apartment development in downtown Raleigh and Durham has seen price increases of 50-100% in the last five years alone.

> And it's not just apartments. The demand for townhomes and condos has sent land values for these types of projects through the roof, with increases of 30-40% in prime locations.

https://www.timmclarke.com/resources/are-land-values-increas...

Of course we can quibble about what amount of that appreciation is caused by zoning changes, but from first principles it is obviously the case that given the same exact plot of land, the expected value of developing 10 houses on it is much higher than the expected value of developing 1 house on it, ergo a lot that allows 10 will have a higher price than that same exact lot constrained to 1 home.

All 3 seem to be going swimmingly so far!

Do you need an explanation of the difference between "impossible" and "challenging?"

I’ll repeat:

All 3 seem to be going swimmingly so far!

There is no material difference between impossible and challenging if the thing doesn’t actually happen.

It’s like Kramer saying he could have levels in his apartment it’s just that he doesn’t want them.

Hard problems are hard, and not impossible.

Well if they never get solved are they hard or are they impossible?

What’s the difference between, “It was hard and we didn’t solve it” and “It was impossible”?

You are aware that no problem was solved before it was solved, right?

Since you ignored my question, I’ll ignore yours.

You are aware you can’t tell a hard unsolved problem from an impossible unsolved problem, right?

Well no, you often can actually. You can have positive information about the impossibility of something, for example the prospect of winning a chess game after losing your king. You don't need to play billions of games of chess to see whether it's possible.

Zoning changes happen all the time. Tax changes happen all the time. Subsidy changes happen all the time.

These are two completely different things. One thing is solving the problem for the world as a whole. That’s the ideal scenario, the one we should aim for. It might get resolved, it might not, but it will definitely take a good amount of time, maybe a very long time.

The other issue is your personal situation. If you're living in a country with intense conflict or in a war zone, you can’t just try to survive for 40 years while “waiting” for the country to make progress. You move, and that’s it.

Plus, given that people’s freedom is constantly increasing, and they have more and more options available, expecting that everyone will autonomously choose a healthy lifestyle is like waiting for Santa Claus—unless you plan to take that freedom away from them.