If you live in binary land, yea... to bad we live in the real world where things are a lot more complicated.

Lets say we lived on an island that had the water resources for 1000 residences. Cool, now we've set limits on the total number of people we can support without things falling apart or costs massively increasing. In rational world the democratic representation sets up a government and creates a set of rules zoning this. In your backwards broken shithole, the first developer with a billion dollars comes in and builds 10,000 houses and everyone is fucked.

These things are very hard to balance. And you're correct, the 'average' voter which tends to correlate with homeowner will vote in their best interest of increasing home prices once they own one. When you strip that away you typically get massive developers wanting to create as many houses as possible, which may or may not work depending on the limitations of the land this occurs on.

And not just too much regulation, but the wrong kind of regulation, and a lack of regulation in areas that need it.

Someone in the article was forced out of her home because her landlord suddenly raised her rent by $500. That shouldn't be legal. Corporations buying up homes in order to drive up prices shouldn't be allowed. Lots of things are allowed that shouldn't be.

And yes, restrictions on building the kind of houses that people really need are also a problem. It's not a case of too much or too little regulation, but the wrong kind.

We live in a democracy. The underlying problem of government is voters.

Most home owners (especially in The Bay) refuse to allow anyone to build anything because they see that as a threat to their home value.

Which is sort of the problem, right? You have an area which is, say, two story buildings, in an area where you really need an average of three story buildings to satisfy local demand.

Implement LVT and everyone gets the bright idea to build twelve story buildings, because why wouldn't they? Three story buildings would have four times the tax per unit.

But then you get the opposite problem. Real estate prices crash, because there are suddenly twelve story buildings going up everywhere and the prices need to fall to the level that building more of them isn't viable even against the tax advantage. Which is well before you're saturated with tall buildings.

But now you have a thousand plots of land and 10% of them have new tall buildings while 90% have existing single family homes. Now the owners of the single family homes are paying a disproportionate amount of the taxes. They abandon their properties, which have already declined in value, because the tax is more than the newly lowered cost of buying space in one of the tall buildings.

The government is now receiving no tax from 90% of the lots because they've been abandoned, so the land tax amount has to increase by ten fold per plot. But that makes it profitable to build 25 story buildings instead of twelve story ones, to amortize the tax over more units, and the cycle repeats.

It seems obvious that this only works if the amount of the land tax isn't large enough to cause these behavioral changes.

Now you're making a completely different argument: Not that the problem is that you have to work in order to buy housing, but that the cost of housing is too high because of artificial restrictions on housing construction.

Which is totally true but is something else entirely -- if housing cost 10% of what it does now, it still wouldn't be free.

> It's a "tragedy of the commons" problem - it would end up better for everyone if the change were to be made, but only if it's done collectively - otherwise any individual player would be at a disadvantage.

It's quite the opposite really. It would be better for anyone individually to build more housing on their land because they would make more money than the construction costs, so in order to prevent that they pass laws prohibiting nearly anybody from doing that.

These laws persist because of regulatory dysfunction. People benefit if the property they own is worth more and the property they might want to buy is worth less -- and any given person doesn't own most property, so the general advantage is to make housing cost less everywhere. But the laws that prevent it are instituted at the local level, in places zoned for single family homes that are predominantly owner-occupied, so the local voters are local homeowners who want local housing prices to go up rather than down. Meanwhile they don't get a vote in what the zoning is somewhere they might want to move to, so the rules make prices go up.

This is a real problem that could be solved by empowering individual property owners to build what they want on their own property, but what does that have anything to do with employers who are largely ambivalent to this? If anything employers should prefer housing costs to be lower so they can attract talent to their locality through a lower cost of living, and pay less in rent themselves.

> Even if let's say you wanted land just to put a tent somewhere and call that your home, well you can't without buying said land first

What are you proposing to do instead? You can't feasibly create more land, and what people actually want the land for is to have shelter. You can create more shelter, but that requires labor. It's never going to be free -- one way or another somebody has to build it. Somebody would even have to make the tent.

We could certainly make it cost less by removing zoning restrictions but less is not free.

The trouble is that it is only a local majority. There are a larger number of people who would like to live in high-demand areas, but they can't vote to make that possible because they don't live there.

> by taking away something people vote to protect - and not just anything, but their homes -,

No-one is suggesting taking away their homes. Just making it more uneconomical to sit on land that has been improved by the state and profit from the ensuing increase in value. I personally would advocate for making these changes to the tax system very slowly, perhaps over the course of 20 years or so.

> and consolidating its ownership to fewer rich property moguls and conglomerates

They don't necessarily have to be rich. I personally wouldn't ever invest in a property conglomerate - they're far too unprofitable and buffeted by political winds. Software is where the money is at, but if you're on this website you already know that.

This isn't the problem until the zoning prohibits tall buildings.

> as well as a planning system and a cabal of builders banking land.

The planning system is the problem. Reforming it is the solution.

> But right now there are a lot of people where they would much rather buy the property they are in than rent it.

So what's stopping them? High prices as a result of supply constraints, right?

The limit is transportation/infrastructure. not buildings. You need NYC's roads, schools, and subway etc before block after block of 40+ floor building are viable. It'a very much a tragedy of the commons situation as a single high rise is fine but 100 of them are not.

Unfortunately, most areas are regulated at the local level which while better than a free for all creates massive problems.

I would posit that the best solution is state level control + an infrastructure tax on new development. Charging ~30k per SFH might seem to make things more expensive but by allowing new entry to pay their own way let market forces work while adjusting for externalities.

This key problem is in no way solved by the political proposal, as "the rich" can move to buy older real estate instead.

> This drives prices up for homes in the city to a point that only if you are in a relationship and over 30 you might be able to buy your first 'home'.

The reason that prices are going up is because a lot of people want to spend a lot of money for the real estate, so in the end you must take a moral stand regarding who owns the right to live and/or own real estate in the city, and what this right is based on. Long term consistency is key here, because short lived stabs at the market like this one will not make any difference apart from creating volatility.

As soon as you create economical impediments to achieve your "moral", or "political" goals, you must ask yourself questions almost like a penetration tester: how would I exploit this law if I wanted to stand to gain from it economically? There's almost always a way, and unless you take this into account before creating the law, you're just making the problem worse, and more complicated (normally the same thing).

> the fun part of government is that you can learn, change and adapt

Government shouldn't be having fun with laws. They should be enacting laws that are thoroughly studied, where the possible outcomes are weighed against eachother to minimize risk and maximize the odds of success. Of course you always need to evaluate and adapt, but this proposal is sloppy to say the least, perhaps even malicious.

No, it's really not.

There's nothing fundamentally anti-democratic about higher government overriding lower government. Often, deciding rules at a lower level doesn't work well, and this is a good example of that.

Deciding housing density at the neighborhood or city level has been an abject failure, because every city is incentivized to benefit from the metro area booming job market while not shouldering responsibility for housing all the new people coming in. Pushing that burden onto the other cities is irresponsible, but that's what they all try to do, with the result being that hardly any cities build sufficient housing.

It'd probably be better to decide this with a metro-level authority rather than the state, but the state is still better than the city.

This is simply wrong.

People are not becoming wealthy with no effort.

If they collectively vote in the zoning conditions that restrict supply, they are ALSO creating a situation where they MUST pay more in taxes to maintain those conditions. Everything becomes more expensive, and is amortized over fewer people.

The residents literally pay every month for those upgrades in higher taxes, longer commutes, higher maintenance costs on larger houses and yards, etc.

In real time, those investments pay off in higher quality of living (which is what you want to access for lower cost).

Over time, those investments MAY, but do not always, result in larger increases in value. I can tell you that values in my town has barely increased in 15+ years, whereas nearby towns have increased 30-100%, and our town has probably the most restrictions.

People are NOT doing this to become wealthy without work. They are doing it for their and their families' quality of life. Sure, there are a few that are flipping houses as a side gig, but the majority of people living in any area I've seen are there building a life and INVESTING in quality of life.

A land value tax would eliminate this. It would simply divert the rental streams from the wealthy to the government (who can then reinvest it back into the community instead, unlike the wealthy who will just siphon it off).

Raising property taxes would help, too, which every municipality can do.

Yes. The problem is when it's already become normal, what do you do?

> It could be argued that the valuation on their property being out of whack is an issue of mismanagement by the local government.

Yes, that's exactly what I was arguing.

> In that case a better approach might be to allow for a majority of that improper pricing to be written off over a number of years as a tax credit.

Which is another way of saying that we, as the entire constituency of that tax base (be it local, state or federal), have decided to subsidize the poor planning (to give the benefit of a doubt) of those local governments and try to correct the issue. While probably the most likely to actually work, I'm not holding my breath, as if the pain isn't spread over a significantly larger population than the original problem, it will be hard to survive for the tax payers, and if is is spread, you run into the problem of people not wanting to pay to fix the problems of others (as short sighted as it is, as it stabilizes things overall).

Because even renters want to live in a nice place?

This is the core problem. Commoditization, or rather, people cornering the market is secondary.

City government is doing this because it is elected by those who own single family units. This is self-stabilizing.

If the majority would live in multi residential highrises, there wouldn't be an incentive to artificially create scarcity. Instead, there would be an incentive to drop housing costs even further by increasing supply.

The problem is that nobody wants to invest in a city with a falling housing market. There needs to be some profit sharing between those who build the housing and those who own the real estate in the city center whose value increases when the city grows.

While zoning doesn't help the problem, it's not the only factor (or even, the biggest factor). Look to the Midwest, where there's absolutely no rules or restrictions on construction of any kind, and plenty of free land or under-used land at cheaper prices, but urban apartments are still $1500-$2000+/month and there's still a housing affordability crisis.

It turns out, if you give away a permanent "YIMBY" attitude, developers won't commoditize themselves, and they won't build enough to meet demand, because it's still more profitable to constrain supply and rent-seek. If there wasn't an artificial scarcity problem already in place, developers would create their own artificial scarcity problem, to preserve their high rents.

Fixing zoning is a great idea, but fixing zoning alone won't decrease house costs for any but the priciest of properties. You won't get a Tokyo-style housing market by just fixing zoning.

Can anyone buy some land and build whatever they want on it, like massive apartment buildings? If the answer is no, how can you claim there is a free market? I think the problem is clearly on the heavy regulations, licensing and zoning that keep companies from building.

Of course. The rich will fight tooth and nail to keep their entitlements. Always have done, always will.

>Why wouldn't they capture that just like they captured zoning?

They would. However, zoning is an easier process to derail because it's more localized and easier to come up with plausible sounding bullshit reasons why something shouldn't happen. In politics you shouldn't attack the shield, you should go for the jugular.

Also you could "fix zoning" and it would still be palliative at best if valuable land is ultimately still being hoarded.

Property developer profits would be higher though.

Hence removing the subsidies or at least making explicit the cost of subsidies, so people are incentivized to go out and vote for increases in supply. Another option is to hand over ownership to government and make everyone do land leases to make them participate in the market and therefore vote the “right” way. Not a perfect solution of course.