Is Sprawl Affordable for Americans?: Exploring the Association Between Housing and Transportation Affordability and Urban Sprawl
Someone claimed sprawl didn't make housing more affordable. Even this anti-sprawl paper says that it does
Unmasking the Latest Leftist Conspiracy: Housing - "In liberal-run states in particular, housing prices have soared and affordability levels have fallen. The causes, as I’ve documented for The American Spectator, involve the usual suspects: excessive land-use regulations, rent controls, taxes, impact fees, and lawsuit-generating environmental rules that reduce supply by driving up the cost of building. In other words, the government reduces supply and can’t figure out why the rent is too damn high. But the newest chilling housing-related problem, according to a widely circulated investigative report by Aaron Glantz in Reveal News (a public radio program), is that “America’s cities are being bought up, bit by bit, by anonymous shell companies using piles of cash.” Glantz is the author of a book with an overwrought and gargantuan title that gives away his point of view: Homewreckers: How a Gang of Wall Street Kingpins, Hedge Fund Magnates, Crooked Banks, and Vulture Capitalists Suckered Millions Out of Their Homes and Demolished the American Dream."
Every time someone on blames "greedy developers" on the high housing costs, I’m showing them this graph that shows housing was cheapest back when developers were allowed to build more : urbanplanning - "The graph below shows the 2010s will end up with the lowest number of housing units started in 6 decades, by a wide margin. It's no coincidence that the 60s-90s had much more affordable housing, when NIMBY behavior and zoning wasn't blocking housing as aggressively. Not to mention the added issue that the handful of cities with the largest growth in high income jobs, are also the ones that have done the worst job at growing supply to meet demand."
It's Time to Stop Demonization of Developers - "To hear the Measure S coalition tell it, developers, be they individuals or companies, want to exploit the city, corrupt the politicians, and build the biggest, ugliest structures they can, everywhere and anywhere. They foist “luxury” apartments upon and invite gentrification into unsuspecting neighborhoods and drive up rents, as if gentrification depends purely on supply and has nothing to do with demand... For too long in Los Angeles, developers have been the only ones actually advocating for more housing. The vast majority of Los Angeles’ rent-burdened residents have sat by (probably because they’re working three jobs) while slow-growth interests have lobbied against every additional unit. This situation has left developers to fend for themselves, pleading their cases before roomfuls of indignant homeowners, praying that planning commissioners and zoning administrators will see through their protests and acknowledge the greater good. And, yes, I’m sure they make occasional campaign contributions. My point is, no one is entirely guilty in this mess, and no one is entirely innocent."
Amusingly, I saw someone claim that single family zoning was the fault of greedy developers and landlords who lobbied for it. Weird how greedy developers don't want high rise towers which will earn them even more money
Soho and Noho locals oppose de blasio's rezoning plan - "Downtown residents disputed the city-led rezoning plan for Soho and Noho during Manhattan Community Board 2’s Land Use Committee virtual public hearing on Tuesday evening. Locals criticized Mayor Bill de Blasio’s proposal as “delusional” — which calls for 3,200 new apartments, including 800 affordable units to the upscale area, plus an update of 50-year-old regulations for business owners and artists... One woman said the mayor wants to destroy the “historical district in the middle of a dystopian pandemic,” to make a deal with developers — and make their families “super rich.”... “What’s going on here is pretty simple,” said Soho resident Jacob Schmidt. ‘”A group of housing millionaires who are mostly old and white are blocking access to an extraordinary valuable neighborhood [to anyone] who didn’t buy an apartment here in the seventies.”... “We need to increase housing supply in this city if we want to achieve better levels of affordability.” “And what better place in New York City to add some of that housing supply than SoHo. It’s a place that is rich in residential housing, it’s rich in jobs, and it’s rich in transit”"
If you don't want developers to make any money, just ban all development. Then you'll never get any new housing or businesses
TRANSIT COST &PROJECT DELIVERY - "A few very visible projects—such as CaliforniaHigh Speed Rail, the Second Avenue Subway in New York, and Washington's Silver Line—reinforce the narrative that both heavy and light rail investments have endemic issues specific to the United States, especially when compared to Western Europe...
New York City Second Avenue subway: $2.6 billion per mile
Copenhagen: $323 million per mile
San Francisco's Central Subway: $920 million per mile
Paris:$160-320 million per mile
Los Angeles’ Purple Line: $800 million per mile
Madrid: $160-320 million per mile."
San Francisco axes affordable housing plan, citing NIMBY outrage - "'the lack of neighborhood support makes it likely the project would be involved in a long EIR litigation that would have added considerable time and cost.'... Christian Church Homes, a religious non-profit that develops affordable housing for seniors, announced in 2016 that it would partner with Forest Hill Christian Church to create new senior housing on a hillside lot at 250 Laguna Honda Boulevard. But Forest Hill residents, including the Forest Hill Association, objected and cited concerns about the possibility of formerly homeless residents moving in to the neighborhood, as well as criticism of the proposed building’s size, locale, and necessary zoning exceptions."
Saving Time and Making Cents: A Blueprint for Building Transit Better - "When faced with escalating costs and community resistance, project sponsors in the United States often select routes along freeways or industrial freight rail rights of way because they are significantly less expensive, do not interface with communities, nor require the intensive utility relocation often necessary for at-grade options along boulevards or other urban roadways. However, the international examples explored in this research include trams constructed at-grade in the median of existing arterials (if not buried), taking existing lanes from cars and putting routes through the denser parts of the region. These projects are delivered at a similar cost to U.S. projects that choose a path of less resistance but provide far more utility and benefit to the communities they serve.The U.S. approach leads some stations to be located in sub-optimal locations and less likely to meet ridership or accessibility goals or serve the most useful routes, ultimately undermining the project’s success"
The NIMBY Threat to Renewable Energy | Sierra Club - "In Vermont, everyone loves clean energy—when it comes from someplace else... "I am totally against ridgeline wind," he says. "It destroys some of the most fragile features of these mountains. They blast to build roads and bring the blades up—a million pounds of explosives in some cases. 'Wind' is a four-letter word in Vermont." Lindholm also hates the noise generated by turbines, claiming that it keeps residents up at night. "Some have had to be bought out," he says. "They're keeping the agreements quiet."... Lindholm isn't much happier with the 20-megawatt solar farm—Vermont's largest—in Ludlow, 50 miles to the north. It's not what you'd call imposing, with rows of panels on a gentle hillside across the road from an aging farm displaying rusty agricultural implements and a big Trump sign. But Lindholm complains that 60 of its 100 acres were once farmland. "We have such rocky soil, prime agricultural land is rare," he says. Ask Lindholm how we can save the planet without utility-scale renewables and he'll give you a fatalistic, Malthusian answer: We won't. "I figured out years ago that human population growth is unstoppable," he says... In 2012, Vermont had at least a dozen wind projects in development. Today, there are none. No industrial-scale wind or solar projects are underway anywhere in the state. "I love Vermont dearly and admire its conservation ethic," Bill McKibben told Sierra. "But there are moments, faced with a global crisis, when it feels like the state motto should be 'Don't change a thing until I die.'"... Says James Moore, co-president of SunCommon, the state's largest solar installer, "We've exported a lot of our environmental impact." Some opposition to renewable energy projects is based on legitimate concerns about protecting natural spaces. But a good portion of the resistance is due to NIMBYism—the "not in my backyard" syndrome. Both anti-development gadflies and wealthy communities with big bankrolls have become adept at stopping needed projects. In Vermont—as elsewhere in the nation—you can't underestimate the power of people not wanting to look at something and having the means to make the problem go away. "It's people with good intentions not wanting to see change in their little piece of the world," Moore says. "We might dress it up in flannel in Vermont, but NIMBYism is NIMBYism. I think we are dangerously close to letting the perfect be the enemy of a livable planet." The headquarters of Vermont's opposition to utility-scale renewable power is Annette Smith's rustic, off-the-grid farm in rural Danby. Smith is the founder and director of Vermonters for a Clean Environment, the group she uses as a cudgel against clean energy developers, and not just the large ones—she is just as likely to organize state residents to fight one- or two-turbine installations in the remote counties of the isolated Northeast Kingdom... What about offshore wind projects—with no noise issues or close neighbors? Smith admits to some ambivalence ("I don't know what to make of it") but suggests objections: poor durability in salt air and weather, underwater transmission lines, threats to whales... That Whole Earth Catalog ethos may be the secret to Smith and Lindholm's successful brand of NIMBYism: For famously self-reliant Vermonters, it reframes energy from a societal problem to an individual choice. If everyone lived a simple, back-to-the-land lifestyle, there would be no need for giant wind turbines... Chad Farrell is the founder and CEO of Encore Renewable Energy, one of Vermont's major renewable developers. He's now looking to expand his company elsewhere. "Every project in this state is some kind of trip hazard," he says, "and a lot of times NIMBYism is behind it. It's something we have struggled with and worked hard to overcome."... "We had to pack up our tents, because we couldn't afford millions of dollars and 10 years of fighting over two turbines"... The amount of renewable energy at play in Vermont may be trivial, but NIMBY opposition is everywhere and could pose big obstacles for President Joe Biden's ambitious energy and climate change plans. Biden has set a goal of a carbon-free power sector by 2035, followed by a net-zero economy by 2050. The Green New Deal embraces that same 2050 goal, envisioning "meeting 100 percent of the power demand in the United States through clean, renewable, and zero-emission energy sources."... All those turbines and solar panels (plus the requisite transmission lines) have to go somewhere. But many communities—including those full of avowed liberals and environmentalists—are working hard to make sure they go somewhere else. In Klickitat County, Washington, retirees who moved to the area for its scenic views convinced their board of commissioners to stop permitting solar farms. In 2019, California's San Bernardino County prohibited the construction of big wind and solar farms on more than a million acres of private land. The Los Angeles Times said that the ruling was "bending to the will of residents who say they don't want renewable energy projects industrializing their rural desert communities." In Coxsackie, New York, a group called Citizens for Sensible Solar organized to stop the construction of utility-scale solar plants that would "destroy the rural aesthetic of their homes.” In Culpeper, Virginia, the blocking of an 80-megawatt solar farm led to the creation of the nonprofit Citizens for Responsible Solar, which works to stop utility-scale projects nationwide. "Rural communities are under attack from big, corporate solar developers (some foreign) who want to build large-scale, industrial solar power plants on agricultural- and forestry-zoned land to take advantage of lower development costs," the group says... Robb Kidd, who runs the chapter's priority campaigns, tells about a eureka moment he had regarding renewable energy siting. He was talking to Søren Hermansen, the renewable energy evangelist from the Danish island of Samsø, which generates all its own power from wind and biomass (and sells excess to the mainland). Kidd asked Hermansen how Samsø got locals on board. "He said before the construction started, they worked in the community to assess the needs""
But of course only conservatives get mocked for not wanting things to change
The US is a lot more individualistic than other countries, so that explains why NIMBYism is so strong there
Community Input Caused the Housing Crisis - The Atlantic - "Development projects in the United States are subject to a process I like to call “whoever yells the loudest and longest wins.” Some refer to this as participatory democracy. Across the country, angry residents and neighborhood associations have the power to delay, reshape, and even halt entirely the construction of vital infrastructure. To put a fine point on it: Deference to community input is a big part of why the U.S. is suffering from a nearly 3.8-million-home shortage and has failed to build sufficient mass transit, and why renewable energy is lacking in even the most progressive states... The existing community-input system purports to improve upon this process by offering a platform where anyone can show up and make their voice heard. After all, providing input shouldn’t just happen at the ballot box, or so the thinking goes. But the process is fundamentally flawed: It’s biased toward the status quo and privileges a small group of residents who for reasons that range from the sympathetic to the selfish don’t want to allow projects that are broadly useful... America’s development process is rife with veto points. The conventional view, moreover, is that community opposition to a project ought to result in its defeat—regardless of the broader benefits it may provide... Attempts to build mass transit also founder on the shores of community input. Neighborhood groups object to 24-hour construction, to “cut and cover” techniques, to the proposed location of entrances and routes—to pretty much anything and everything, leading to delays and expensive workarounds... Sometimes the mere specter of community objection is enough to make a project less ambitious or less effective... And when it comes to renewable-energy infrastructure, story after story has demonstrated the power of local opposition to delay or kill these projects, even in nominally progressive parts of the country.. Not only do community groups block explicitly green developments; they have weaponized environmental regulations in their quest to do so... Research by the George Washington University professor Leah Brooks and the Yale Law professor Zachary Liscow provides another indication of the cost of what the researchers call “citizen voice.” Brooks and Liscow looked at highway projects (which are also subject to environmental review) and found that interstate construction was three times as expensive in the 1980s as it was in the 1960s. They explored and cast aside as insufficient many of the traditional explanations for this phenomenon, including the price of labor, materials, and land. They noticed that the cost increase was absent until “the late 1960s or early 1970s,” when “institutional changes significantly expanded the opportunity for citizens to directly influence government behavior to reflect their concerns.” And they conjecture that the power of yelling loudly—with your lawyer on speed dial—became more and more effective because of three factors: a Supreme Court decision that “expanded citizens’ ability to sue administrative agencies and subject their decisions to judicial scrutiny,” the proliferation of activist organizations that amplified the power of individual voices, and NEPA... The community-input process is disastrous for two broad reasons. First, community input is not representative of the local population. Second, the perception of who counts as part of an affected local community tends to include everyone who feels the negative costs of development but only a fragment of the beneficiaries. Not everybody is a complainer, but pretty much everyone who shows up to community meetings is. Katherine Einstein, David Glick, and Maxwell Palmer, Boston University political scientists and co-authors of Neighborhood Defenders, examined zoning and planning meetings across Massachusetts. They found that a measly 14.6 percent of people who showed up to these events were in favor of the relevant projects. Meeting participants were also 25 percentage points more likely to be homeowners and were significantly older, maler, and whiter than their communities. This representational problem is not one that can easily be solved by making these meetings more accessible. The BU researchers looked into what happened when meetings moved online during the coronavirus pandemic and discovered that, if anything, they became slightly less representative of the population... The downsides of new development tend to be very localized: loud noises from construction, or an obscured view. As a result, opponents can easily find one another and form a political bloc. By contrast, the beneficiaries are either unknown at the inception of the project (no one knows who will eventually inhabit a house a developer wants to build) or extremely diffuse (all the people who would hypothetically take mass transit if it existed)... in the middle of an interview, Einstein (one of the Boston University researchers) lost cell service. When she called me back, she explained that residents of a town she drives through on the way home from work successfully engaged in a community-input process to prevent the construction of a cellphone tower... other nations are able to weigh environmental and aesthetic concerns without opening themselves up to never-ending lawsuits. According to the transit-costs researcher Alon Levy, France conducts “environmental and historical reviews in-house, without lawsuit enforcement,” and Italy “has strict laws for protection of historical and archeological monuments, but there is an administrative bureaucracy that checks that they are followed.”... 'two prominent papers find that the negative effect of zoning restrictions in just three big rich metropolitan areas is larger than 8% of the U.S. economy, which is about the size of Canada’s GDP.'"
Of course, all the pro-public transit people will insist that the US only has bad public transit (unlike Europe) because of automobile industry lobbying in the 50s (or earlier: which magically still inexorably determines public transit outcomes today) - "the people" are never at fault. It's always evil and greedy companies (weird how public transport outside city centres in Australia and New Zealand isn't great either)
Why are we so slow today?. Five amazing facts about environmental review | by Eli Dourado - "We used to do things fast, and Patrick Collison has proof. The Stripe CEO maintains a list on his personal web page of feats of rapid, decisive action. Tegel Airport was built in 92 days in 1948 to support the Berlin Airlift. The Empire State Building took 410 days to construct. The 1,700-mile Alaska Highway was built in 234 days. Why do we seem incapable today of the same sort of urgent action? The answer is surely complex, but at least part of the answer is environmental review. In the United States, a statute called the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) requires review of major federal actions “significantly affecting the quality of the human environment.” Federal actions include issuing of federal permits or approvals to private projects, and therefore NEPA effectively applies to these private projects as well. In addition to the federal NEPA, at least 20 states and localities have statutes, known as “Little NEPAs,” that require similar review... NEPA took effect on January 1, 1970, and initially, these statements were quite short. Some were as short as 10 pages, with no record of complaints about them. But over time, as EISs were challenged in court, page counts increased. NEPA is a procedural statute; if a court finds an EIS to be inadequate, all it does is halt the project and instruct the agency to add a section to the EIS. In order to avoid such court orders, agencies started developing longer and longer EISs. Today, the average length of an EIS is more than 600 pages plus appendices, which themselves average over 1,000 pages. This runaway page count inflation has also taken a toll on timelines to complete EISs. Conditional on completion, EISs now take an average of 4.5 years to complete, and the right tail of the distribution is long. The Council on Environmental Quality identified 4 EISs completed between 2010 and 2017 that took at least 17 years. During this time, no action could be taken on these projects. Not a single shovelful of dirt could be moved. And of course, this statistic leaves out EISs that are literally interminable. Not only are EIS timelines long, they are growing. The latest annual report from the National Association of Environmental Practitioners finds that average EIS preparation time is increasing by about 39.5 days per year. The federal government issues an average of 222 final EISs per year. While the need to wait on any individual EIS to complete can create serious problems for both private and federal projects, it isn’t where the majority of environmental paperwork lies. One level down from an EIS is an environmental assessment, used to determine whether there is a significant environmental effect and therefore whether an EIS needs to follow. In recent years, the federal government has completed around 12,000 environmental assessments per year. The vast majority of these, more than 98 percent, conclude in a finding of no significant impact. The less than 2 percent that do not must go on to perform an EIS. Complete statistics do not exist for environmental assessments, but due to the same litigation dynamic affecting EISs, they too have ballooned in length and can take years to conclude... If environmental review was the only way to protect the environment, these lengthy processes might be worthwhile. In reality, the NEPA process is purely procedural. Federal agencies can go through the entire process, find that the action under consideration imposes huge environmental harms, and decide to go through with it anyway. The process doesn’t provide any substantive environmental protection. Infuriatingly, the NEPA process even delays projects with clear environmental benefits. For example, Manhattan’s congestion pricing scheme is currently in NEPA limbo as it awaits guidance from the federal government over whether to prepare an environmental assessment or an EIS. Vineyard Wind, a $2.8 billion, 800-megawatt offshore wind energy project is also facing delays from environmental review. The Forest Service has testified that “each time we go through the appeal process or the courts, much of our limited resources are employed to defend the decisions we feel are crucial to restoring ecosystems and addressing forest health concerns” and that “[d]elays in restoration and forest health treatments…leave forests susceptible to insect and disease and predispose ecosystems to unwanted wildfire.” NEPA, then, doesn’t actually privilege environmental protection. Like any procedural requirement, it privileges the status quo... In 2009, facing the worst economic crisis in decades, President Obama signed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, appropriating $831 billion in stimulus to the ailing economy. One of the primary purposes of the Act was to create jobs through infrastructure construction projects. Unfortunately, these projects were subject to environmental review under NEPA, and therefore in some cases the spending that was allocated to prop up the 2009 economy didn’t actually materialize for many years... Environmental review, therefore, was partially responsible for the severity of the recession."
CEQA Is an Abomination That Hurts Housing - The Atlantic - "when a local nonprofit developer proposed several years ago to build a 49-unit apartment building on the lot—with 24 homes set aside for disabled veterans experiencing homelessness—it was slammed with an environmental lawsuit. A single angry neighbor was able to delay the project, thanks to a piece of legislation known as the California Environmental Quality Act. Although a 189-page assessment found that all possible environmental effects could be mitigated, the suit demanded that planners spend years conducting additional environmental research. The site—covered in cracked concrete and lined with a barbed-wire-topped chain-link fence—remains empty to this day... Across the Golden State, CEQA lawsuits have imperiled infill housing in Sacramento, solar farms in San Diego, and transit in San Francisco. The mere threat of a lawsuit is enough to stop small projects—especially housing—from starting in the first place. Indeed, one of the main effects of CEQA has been to exacerbate the state’s crippling housing-affordability crisis... NIMBYs seem to continually discover new, creative reasons to block housing. In 2018, a proposal to redevelop a San Francisco laundromat as a 75-unit apartment building was held up on the basis that the developer had not fully considered the project’s effect on “community character.” This followed a similar bad-faith attempt by project opponents to get the laundromat—a squat, one-story building hemmed in by a parking lot—designated as a historic landmark. A CEQA suit is now so terrifying to developers—the delays so long, the legal fees so excessive—that the mere threat of one is enough to force a developer to the table. As with so much about California’s environmental-review law, this might sound great in theory. But in practice, it has given rise to the phenomenon of “greenmailing,” whereby special interests as varied as construction unions, neighborhood groups, and business associations can force concessions from a project before the public review even starts. At times, this can end up looking a lot like extortion: In one recent case, a CEQA litigant allegedly demanded $5.5 million from a developer in exchange for dropping a baseless environmental suit. This type of backdoor haggling represents a fundamental usurpation of the very idea of planning. If a lone NIMBY can second-guess the decisions of local city councils and city-planning commissions, what good are institutions such as comprehensive planning, public hearings, or disclosure requirements? The original idea of CEQA was to strengthen the California planning process by informing the public. Instead, what we’ve ended up with is a system that subjects even humdrum infill proposals to obtuse multi-binder reports and shady dealings, leaving a housing-affordability crisis in its wake."
"Environmental protection" sounds good, so it doesn't matter if it's screwing things up
What Ever Happened to Public Transportation? - "Public transit in the United States has not always been so neglected. In the 1920s and 1930s, almost every town in the country had a light- rail system trolley service. Mass transit was convenient, cheap, and plentiful. But in the years between 1936 and 1950, there took place one of the sorriest events in our nation's history--what has become known as the "Great American Streetcar Scandal." A number of large corporations, including General Motors, Firestone Tire, Standard Oil of California, and Phillips Petroleum, operating secretly through front organizations, conspired to purchase streetcar systems in forty- five major U.S. cities, including Detroit, New York City, Oakland, Philadelphia, Phoenix, St. Louis, Salt Lake City, Tulsa, Baltimore, Chicago, Minneapolis, and Los Angeles. The consortium then proceeded to completely dismantle the trolley systems, ripping up their tracks and tearing down their overhead wires. For this, General Motors and its corporate allies were indicted in 1947 on federal antitrust charges. For two years, the workings of the conspiracy and its underlying intentions were exposed in federal court. Eventually, despite being represented by the best attorneys money could buy, the defendants were found guilty by the federal jury. Amazingly, the executives who secretly contrived and carried out the demolition of America's light- rail network were fined a grand total of one dollar each. Having destroyed the mass transit network that would otherwise have been their competition, the auto and oil companies quickly acquired dominion over the transportation policies of the country"
The real story behind the demise of America's once-mighty streetcars - ""There's this widespread conspiracy theory that the streetcars were bought up by a company National City Lines, which was effectively controlled by GM, so that they could be torn up and converted into bus lines," says Peter Norton, a historian at the University of Virginia and author of Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City. But that's not actually the full story, he says. "By the time National City Lines was buying up these streetcar companies, they were already in bankruptcy." Surprisingly, though, streetcars didn't solely go bankrupt because people chose cars over rail. The real reasons for the streetcar's demise are much less nefarious than a GM-driven conspiracy — they include gridlock and city rules that kept fares artificially low"
Listen to the experts, unless they debunk liberal myths
Ask the Rambler: Did the Highway Lobby Stop Congress from Funding Transit Instead of the Interstate System in 1956? - "If you've read an anti-sprawl book, you've read the horror story: the evil Highway Lobby (motto: Let's Pave Over America) tricked Congress in 1956 into building Interstate highways instead of providing aid to transit as Congress otherwise would have done-thereby forcing people who longed for transit to buy cars instead... During World War II, transit boomed at a time of civilian shortages of gasoline and rubber. After the war, people returned to their cars... Except for the period of World War II, he pointed out, transit volumes had been declining since the 1920s... Through the mid-1950s, transit was provided throughout the country mainly by private companies. With ridership declining, many companies were financially strapped. Despite pressure from local officials, the companies were cutting unprofitable lines, putting off maintenance, raising fares-and moving in a downward spiral. Many were still profitable in the mid-1950s, but bankruptcy was in their future. Despite these problems, no one in 1955-1956 thought the Federal Government should subsidize provide transit companies... 'Given its keen interest in its tax exemption proposal, the ATA [Ed: American Transit Association] was obviously disabled from also arguing that the Interstate program should incur special expenses for the sake of public transit'... The Rambler humbly (for him) suggests that before writing about this era, anti-sprawl authors might want to read about the 1950s, an era when the American people loved automobiles, the newer and bigger the better. They loved vacation road trips and the mobility the automobile gave them in their daily lives. They eagerly awaited their first glimpses of the new car models each fall. By the mid-1950s, they longed for the promised freeways that President Eisenhower and Members of Congress were certain they would be applauded for making possible. And you don't have to take the word of The Rambler, who may be a little biased. Here's what Professor George M. Smerk, who has studied transit his entire career, wrote about the 1950s:
Virtually no thought was given to investment by government in transit; after all, except in a very few places, it was a private enterprise responsibility...
Perhaps the Interstate System was a terrible idea. Perhaps the country shouldn't have built it. Perhaps it destroyed our cities, ruined passenger rail, killed transit, polluted our air, drained our oil fields, and supported sprawl not only into the suburbs but the exurbs. Perhaps. But it is simply not true that the Highway Lobby tricked Congress into applying highway user revenue or revenue from any other source to construction of the Interstate System instead of transit."
Michael Kaess on Twitter - "Bronx Community Board 10 held an in-person meeting so people who bought their homes decades ago could come and scream, “We don’t need affordable housing.” If a 1.4% rental vacancy rate in Bronx CB10 is accurate - that suggests a significant housing shortage in the community. When was the last time anyone at this meeting looked for an apartment? I urge @cmmvelaz and @bronxbp to reject this NIMBY nonsense and fight for more housing. Bronx CB10 had folks, mostly ‘community leaders’ and former politicians, give prepared remarks before the applicants gave their presentation. ‘Neighborhood character’ can never be more important than meeting our basic housing needs."
How Minneapolis Ended Single-Family Zoning
The Effect of Zoning on Housing Prices - "We estimate that zoning restrictions raised the average price of detached houses, relative to supply costs, by 69 percent in Melbourne, 42 percent in Brisbane, and 54 percent in Perth. As a share of the total price, these contributions are 42 percent (Sydney), 41 percent (Melbourne), 29 percent (Brisbane), and 35 percent (Perth). Higher-density dwellings require a slightly different approach. We estimate that zoning restrictions raised average apartment prices, relative to marginal cost, by 85 percent in Sydney, 30 percent in Melbourne, and 26 percent in Brisbane. These estimates are qualitatively similar to those that other researchers have found, including studies focusing on real estate prices in Southern California, Florida, New Zealand, Manhattan, and Europe. As shown in Figure 1, the effect of zoning has increased substantially over time. This increase seems attributable to rising demand—due in turn to higher population, higher incomes, and lower interest rates—interacting with regulations that have prevented supply from keeping up."
The Impact of Zoning on Housing Affordability - "Does America face an affordable housing crisis and, if so, why? This paper argues that in much of America the price of housing is quite close to the marginal, physical costs of new construction. The price of housing is significantly higher than construction costs only in a limited number of areas, such as California and some eastern cities. In those areas, we argue that high prices have little to do with conventional models with a free market for land. Instead, our evidence suggests that zoning and other land use controls, play the dominant role in making housing expensive."
More in U.S. now prefer big houses, even if amenities are farther away - "Americans today are more likely than they were in the fall of 2019 to express a preference for living in a community where “houses are larger and farther apart, but schools, stores and restaurants are several miles away,” according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted July 8-18, 2021... six-in-ten U.S. adults say they would prefer to live in a community with larger homes with greater distances to retail stores and schools (up 7 percentage points since 2019), while 39% say they prefer a community with smaller houses that are closer together with schools, stores and restaurants within walking distance (down 8 points since 2019)."
Yet house prices suggests they don't put their money where their mouth is
How Much Is A Condo, And Are They Worth It? - "Single-family homes tend to be more expensive than condos, which might have an impact on your decision. The National Association of REALTORS® reported that the median price of an existing single-family home stood at $334,500 in March 2021. The association also said that the median price of an existing condo unit was $289,000 the same month. That’s $45,500 less – a difference of more than almost 15%."
What people say they want and what people really want aren't always the same
Zone Defense: Why Liberal Cities Build Fewer Houses - "In this paper, I investigate a puzzling feature of American urban politics: cities with more liberal residents tend to permit fewer new housing units each year than similarconservative cities. Empirically, I show that this relationship is not attributable to differences in income, demographics, geography, or characteristics of the housing stock. To help explain this puzzle, I develop a formal model of municipal zoning policy. In this model, liberal cities are characterized by generous levels of public goods spending.This, in turn, attracts new households, who have an incentive to construct inexpensive housing. If permitted to do so, the added property tax revenue from these new households would be insufficient to cover their share of public spending. In a spatial sorting equilibrium, any city that offers generous public goods spending must also enact restrictive zoning to defend it."
Liberal cities build less housing than conservative ones
When generous liberal policies means you can't afford to build cheap housing
Is BlackRock Buying Too Many Houses? - "It’s estimated as of 2019 there were around 300,000 single-family home rentals operated by professional investors. That same year there were more than 5.5 million houses sold in the United States. In 2018, there were 5 million homes sold. 2020 saw more than 6 million homes change hands... BlackRock owns around $60 billion in real estate assets. The value of the housing market in the United States is more like $36 trillion. If you want to be mad at anyone here, direct your ire at local governments who make it difficult to build more houses. We need to build more homes... The reason there was a big housing boom in the 1950s is not because homebuilders made it happen but because the government incentivized them to build more. Ironically, it could be the professional investors who pick up the slack in terms of building more starter homes. The only difference is those starter homes will be rentals... Some young people don’t want to get tied down with a 30 year mortgage or all of the ancillary costs that come with home ownership. Flexibility could be more important than ever in the years ahead, especially as people now have more options when it comes to remote work.>. Renters could take the money they’re not spending on things like taxes and other costs associated with housing and invest the difference in real estate. That places the onus on people to be more financially savvy but could make sense for those who don’t want to own."
This won't stop liberals and their moral panic over institutional investors paying over asking to buy up all the housing to corner the market, then jack up prices
BlackRock Is Not Ruining the U.S. Housing Market - The Atlantic - "Rental-home companies own less than half of one percent of all housing, even in states such as Texas, where they were actively buying up foreclosed properties after the Great Recession... Besides, BlackRock and investors like it aren’t necessarily taking homes away from ordinary families. As the Vox reporter Jerusalem Demsas explains, institutional investors tend to buy homes that need significant repairs. That means they’re often competing with other investors... institutional investors are more likely than individuals to report making improvements to their rental holdings.*... Nothing in the BlackRock saga is central to America’s larger housing problem, which is, simply stated: Where the hell are all the houses?... Far worse than corporations taking a few thousand units off the market for owners are the governments and noisy NIMBYish residents taking millions of units off the market for owners and renters alike—by blocking construction projects in the past few decades. (California alone has an estimated shortage of 3 million housing units.) From New York to California, deep-blue cities and states have amassed a pitiful record of blocking housing construction and failing to meet rising demand with adequate supply. Many of the people tweeting about BlackRock are represented by city councils and state governments, or are surrounded by zoning laws and local ordinances that make home construction something between onerous and impossible. Through law and custom, the U.S. has encouraged people to buy and cherish their houses. But by asking Americans to see their homes as precious investment vehicles, these laws activate a scarcity mindset and sow the seeds of NIMBYism: Don’t dilute my equity with new construction! How can we encourage Americans to support more housing construction near where they live? Maybe the answer is … more single-family rentals. As the Bloomberg columnist Conor Sen points out, homeowners tend to look down on nearby construction, because more ample housing could drive down the cost of their property. But renters might celebrate nearby construction for the same general principle: Ample housing might hold down their rent. In the arithmetic of online outrage—where big banks are evil, and landlords suck—nothing is more villainous than a big-bank landlord. But the larger villain in America’s housing crunch isn’t the faceless Wall Street Goliath overseeing your apartment building or house; it’s the forces stopping any new apartment buildings or houses from existing in the first place: your neighbors, local laws, and local governments. If we can’t see the culprit of America’s housing crisis, that’s because we’re eager to look everywhere except in the mirror."
Why Are American Houses So Flimsy and Poorly Built? - "One striking aspect of houses in America is the flimsy quality of even the most expensive ones. Houses are built literally like a house of cards. Weak beams, plywood, flimsy insulation, flimsy siding, and roofing that either blows off in high winds or just rots away after a few years. It's really no wonder that come tornado or hurricane season, houses are literally ripped off of their foundations and tossed into the air. In contrast, houses and most buildings in Europe are much sturdier, being built with stone or cinder blocks or brick for the whole wall and inside walls. This is true for new houses and apartment blocks as well as old buildings. This is the reason we see buildings hundreds of years old still standing in good shape. In the United States, a 50-year-old house is considered old and is torn down to make room for another flimsy yet expensive structure. American houses sometimes do have the appearance of having brick walls; however, these are usually just stuck onto the outside of the plywood walls giving a false sense of quality and strength. It is understandable that using flimsy wood is cheaper than using stone or concrete, but this is not really evident by the prices of houses. I have seen multi-million dollar new houses in the States that are built using the same plywood, insulation, and shabby roofing material as cheaper houses. The fact that walls are paper thin and conversations can be heard two rooms away is nothing strange in American houses. We also see quality problems in areas like rotting walls, water getting into insulation, termites, and leaking roofs. Houses built of plywood and low-quality beams will not last all that long. Using staple guns to hold plywood to beams is usually going to end up shabby. Contractors tend to use the cheapest materials and throw buildings up as fast as they can in order to maximize profits. For some reason, this shabby building tradition has become the norm in the U.S. The origins of this building style can be drawn to the 1950s with the post-war boom period when Americans could suddenly afford to buy homes in sprawling new suburbs where almost pre-fabricated style identical-looking houses mushroomed virtually overnight... Unfortunately, it is unlikely that many U.S. houses or other buildings will still be around say 500 years from now. The American mindset of bulldozing the old and building something new instead every few decades keeps us from having a sense of history, at least where architecture and physical structures are concerned. All great civilizations have left structures for us to admire: Rome, Egypt, Greece, Byzantium, Incas, Aztec, etc. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem likely that American civilization will leave any impressive physical structures behind for posterity, as even skyscrapers are often leveled after a few decades to make way for new ones. This is also a part of being a consumer society that throws away the old to make way for the supposed goodness of the new—and at the same time discards vestiges of our past."
