The invisible laws that led to America’s housing crisis
The invisible laws that led to America’s housing crisis
In the 1910s, US cities began enacting policies that would shape neighborhoods and, unintentionally, lay the roots for the severe housing shortage today: single-family zoning laws.
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This is the root of the problems with housing. We stopped building cities the way cities were built for thousands of years to try a new method. Even after proving that method costs more, uses more land, and is socially isolating, that method is promoted.
I personally think corporate greed helps keep it this way as this type of development promotes more spending. You have to buy a car, gas, insurance and you have to use it to get anywhere. This lets those "I'm already here so I'll get this" or "I dont wanna drive again so ill buy more" mindsets flourish. Single family homes often leads to everyone owning a lot of stuff as well, private pool, private lawn equipment, private playground for your kid to play alone.
Developer greed also plays a role as buildings are built to be the most profitable, not the most useful, even most new SFH developments are massive, luxury homes. Developers won't build smaller, affordable homes because they get less money per square foot of developable land.
I don’t think the “corporate greed” argument is that relevant here, not having to buy all of those things means someone has more disposable income, so spending I don’t think really changes, it’s just you spend less on necessities and more on “fun stuff” so to speak. There’s not much imperial evidence to support it either way, and most of the opposition to zoning reform comes from NIMBys who are scared of any changes in the neighborhood and maybe a little bigoted.
Speaking of which - developers: They have good reason to support denser housing, they’ll get higher returns on selling more houses or apartments on the same land. The reason houses are built huge and expensive is that zoning laws specify large minimum lot sizes, forcing developers to sell what few homes they can build for higher prices. Single family zoning creates artificial scarcity (again mostly out of bigotry and paranoia). If developers weee given more freedom to build what they want, it would be most economical for them to build transit-oriented rowhouse developments. This was standard practice a century ago, but since then it’s mostly been banned.
Unfortunately, the political climate favours corporations over public opinion, so corporations have the real power to change our policies. I doubt they would want anything that helps local busniesses thrive (like density and transit) and reduces our dependancy on products like gasoline, cars, and bulk processed foods. Building in a way that the only convenient option is to drive to whatever strip mall is close to you ensures that the corporations in the strip malls and big auto/oil still get your money while they are subsidized by cities/governments.
This seems rather conspiratorial in my opinion, though it’s probably true in a few cases, I doubt it’s the majority. I think a lot of the pushback is from older people who are resistant to the idea for a variety of reasons, and they also happen to be more civically active in a number of places.
I see far more evidence do the latter than the former.
Ditto on pushback coming from private citizens rather than big corporations. I’ve seen it with my own eyes, NIMBYs in my neighborhood killing a proposed denser construction project. The “greedy” development firm wanted to build, the NIMBYs killed it. The article itself even mentions this, this is democracy doing its thing:
Homeowners wielded huge political influence to block any changes they believed could hurt their property values.
Blaming corporate greed is an absolutely idiotic take. If only we relax NIMBY zoning laws, then the “corporate greed” of developers would automatically incentivize them to build all the dense housing we need (they are in fact very happy to build denser smaller lots if allowed to, contrary to what fire retardant claims), and finally start increasing the supply of housing in order to lower market price.