20 Comments

Glad to see you acknowledging America's housing shortage. USA desperately needs more apartments, and we need zoning reform in all our cities to make it easier to build apartments. Housing won't get cheaper until we do.

It will make COL cheaper and boost our economy in several ways while creating many thousands of jobs. As a bonus it will make our cities more pedestrian- and transit-friendly.

We just need to combat the NIMBYs who are fighting against any and all apartments.

Expand full comment

Zoning reform isnt needed, zoning elimination is needed.

Playing at the edges wont do much good.

And just allowing building will make housing cheaper, more apartments will help, but more expensive luxury homes will too. In the housing market, trickle down really happens. Everyone can move up the ladder at slightly reduced prices.

Expand full comment

Zoning reform bills that attempt to do too much never pass state legislatures (see Texas, Colorado, New York). The most successful/impactful zoning reform efforts do it piece by piece.

Also, apartments can be plenty luxurious. And rowhouses.

Expand full comment

I would prefer a supreme court decison overturning Euclid.

Expand full comment

I would prefer money to fall from the sky but it doesn’t make for a relevant argument whatsoever here on planet earth.

Expand full comment

presume this would be a very focussed on you money fall

Expand full comment

Mine can happen.

It had 3 dissents at the time, the current court is overturning past decisions (like today), so it is within the realm of possible. You have to go for broke, you can always compromise later. But if you start with a weak position, you get negotiated down to nothing.

Expand full comment

Lol nope. Check the latest zoning reform efforts in Texas, Colorado and NY that tried to everything at once and never passed the state legislature. Major losses for zoning reform advocates.

The most successful and impactful zoning reforms take a reasoned approach.

Expand full comment

He wrote a whole book on it…

Expand full comment

The only thing that developers will take from the call for zoning reform via, "free market rules and democracy drools" is that they now have another device for their skullduggery. One can say that developers are being used as scapegoats, but those doing so have never met a developer and to me fit Thomas Sowell's definition of an intellectual in his, " Intellectuals and Society". Idea people never suffer the consequences of being wrong in their ideas.

Expand full comment

In the stupidity of war, does the author address game theory stuff along the lines of, if I'm very unwilling to go to war, bullies will take advantage of this?

Expand full comment

I went to one community meeting on building at it was as described.

The question though is why these people win. I've also worked for government briefly and nobody gave a fuck about public comments or changed policy based on them.

My town recently had an election in which the NIMBY candidate won. Bored old people who attend building meetings aren't the reason they won. It's more than that.

I'm still on the waiting list for my local elementary school because it's "full". This and other concerns are why many normies vote for NIMBY even if they never attended a building meeting in their lives.

Expand full comment

We get homeless encampments not because housing isn’t affordable. Housing for those in the encampments is _gratis_, along with water, food, and clothing.

There are people who are content with very little, so long as they stay alive until they get their next fix. The more comfortable that very little is, the more people who choose to live that way.

Expand full comment

So if you are against taking the Covid vax, then you are an expensive consumer of irrationality?

Expand full comment

If your reasons for not taking it are irrational and then you get COVID and die, then yes, that was rather expensive for you. Remember, if you are reading this blog, your sense of what is or isn't rational already likely differs a great deal from the national average.

Expand full comment