> It's political suicide to do anything that would hurt the valuations of homes. If you are an older individual with your home making up a bulk of your retirement nest egg, you aren't going to vote for policies that make homes more affordable.
I hear this argument a lot, but it completely ignores the fact that development can allow more housing and continue to increase the value of existing housing.
The key is that more housing isn’t going to look like existing housing: it’s going to be condos and other apartments. Older folks in single-family homes are not going to see their houses lose value — if anything, the increase will continue, because now a developer can buy their house and turn it into four apartments.
Here’s how it would work: family buys single family home in year A for $100k. Lives there for a while, then sells in year B for $200k. The buyer is a developer, who then constructs a larger building on that same lot consisting of 4 apartments that now each sell for $100k again. Original family gains in wealth, developer makes tidy profit, new families can still buy a place to live for $100k. All numbers inflation-adjusted, you pick A and B to make whatever return you think is reasonable.
This is how densification happened almost everywhere until zoning laws spread mid-century.
Note what you don’t get out of this arrangement: a neighborhood that doesn’t change for 40 years; the ability to live in the same type of house your parents did, in the same neighborhood, for the same price. But you could have the same amount of (indoor) space they did, and outdoor space through public parks and the like.
What’s not sustainable is everyone having a suburban style detached single family home without increasing density in perpetuity.
The non-density alternative is sprawl, where prices rise in long-established neighborhoods, and outlying new developments are where you can buy new houses for less—which is what you observe all over California.
That only works if you have 4 new people who want to live there.
We could probably achieve that through immigration for a while, but there is still a sustainability problem that keeping some constraints on housing construction solves. I say this as someone who would love cheap housing in a desirable area.
Empty buildings tend to create problems, and the energy to tear them down/convert them to something else often isn't there once the population begins decreasing.
I hear this argument a lot, but it completely ignores the fact that development can allow more housing and continue to increase the value of existing housing.
The key is that more housing isn’t going to look like existing housing: it’s going to be condos and other apartments. Older folks in single-family homes are not going to see their houses lose value — if anything, the increase will continue, because now a developer can buy their house and turn it into four apartments.
Here’s how it would work: family buys single family home in year A for $100k. Lives there for a while, then sells in year B for $200k. The buyer is a developer, who then constructs a larger building on that same lot consisting of 4 apartments that now each sell for $100k again. Original family gains in wealth, developer makes tidy profit, new families can still buy a place to live for $100k. All numbers inflation-adjusted, you pick A and B to make whatever return you think is reasonable.
This is how densification happened almost everywhere until zoning laws spread mid-century.
Note what you don’t get out of this arrangement: a neighborhood that doesn’t change for 40 years; the ability to live in the same type of house your parents did, in the same neighborhood, for the same price. But you could have the same amount of (indoor) space they did, and outdoor space through public parks and the like.
What’s not sustainable is everyone having a suburban style detached single family home without increasing density in perpetuity.
The non-density alternative is sprawl, where prices rise in long-established neighborhoods, and outlying new developments are where you can buy new houses for less—which is what you observe all over California.