A well-researched video that explains why some dense urban areas are quite expensive.
TL;DW: Despite a substantial historic housing stock, our most expensive cities have built very little housing in recent years, leading to very low vacancy rates and high prices. Ramping up housing construction will be a necessary part of solving the affordability crisis.
It still irks me how there is incentives for private companies to build dense, but they literally cannot since zoning laws make it illegal. Like, how often are the incentives of corps aligned with the public?
Not often. I think in general they are not that aligned, it’s just that overly restrictive zoning and other bad policies have created such a severe crisis that the free market solution, which in a better society we might spend more time critiquing, has become dramatically superior to the status quo.
I think long-run we should still develop better systems to build and distribute housing according to the needs of the community as a whole instead of private investors and the wealthy, but those systems today are virtually non-existent, and they take time to build. Today, people are literally dying on the streets because housing is too expensive. I think it’s harmful to be too ideologically purist about solutions in the midst of such a serious crisis.
I totally agree with you. I’m simply astonished that we’re in this situation at all.