The Great Downzoning

> In some places, anti-densification rules continue to raise property values, and in these places we should expect the Downzoning to be as politically robust as it has been for the last century: it really does give property owners something they want.

I have to wonder to what extent that's actually true. To begin with, if you have a single family home in an area with high demand, upzoning could make someone willing to pay you even more than the house is currently worth because they could still turn a profit when turning it into ten or twenty times as much housing on the same lot. In other words, the value of the house may go down but the value of the land goes up when you can build more housing on it.

On top of that, higher housing prices don't necessarily equate to a better life or even more money. If your house is worth more but you still need a place to live then you can't sell it, unless you are planning to sell it soon in which case upzoning gets you more money because developers start bidding on your house before the new housing the upzoning allows to be built is on the market yet.

If not, it's not just your house that costs more. The other ones do too, which increases cost of living. Local shops have to pay higher rents and pass on that cost to you, or can't find local workers because young people can't afford local rent, so they have to close down. Then you get higher local unemployment and more crime and homelessness. You might even lose your own job because your employer moved out. What do you think drives offshoring? High domestic costs.

And if people are only thinking about the first order effect then they might imagine downzoning is to their advantage when it isn't. Which makes them support it but only until someone shows them the math.

I wonder about this. There's all this noise about a great housing shortage in San Francisco, but the population of SF is up only 65,000 people in 10 years. There are a lot more tall buildings. This may be a monopoly overpricing situation rather than an actual shortage. There's a huge amount of empty office space.

Remember, the world passed "peak baby" back in 2013. Population is leveling off in the developed world.

Where I live in France there was a big relaxation in building permits in the 50s to 70s, and we are dealing with these projects badly designed (because of the lack of oversight) today. Neighborhoods that are urban hell, disfigured city centers with giant hotels 5 times higher than other buildings, etc.

With better planning the same capacity could have been added but with way better quality of life.

That watercolor promoting "cite jardin de Gennevilliers" has a stormy and threatening sky. Lead white is probably the culprit (reacts with sulfur over time).

The one thing that makes assumptions about free market forces miss the mark is the fact that ideal markets don’t exist in the real world.

I case of housing, in the US, we’re as far from free market as possible. So making assumptions about what will happen if we build more based on a naive supply and demand model isn’t going to work.

A paradigm shift is to think in terms of power distribution and policy incentives. Why would a homeowner support zoning reforms? Even if they become a minority, will they be able to get the others to not vote or vote against their own interests?

The system caps its own growth.

Sounds like a great test case for public intervention to shake up a bad market equilibrium: acquire large areas of land and build new cities and neighborhoods unencumbered by land use and zoning bylaws.

> nearly every city in the Western world banned densification.

I mean thats not true, as you well know. London put a massive belt around it to stop it from growing, which means its artificially dense. Its population density is 4/5x of amsterdam.

The US has a predilection for urban sprawl, but elsewhere thats not the case so much in Europe because land is expensive.

Well, you either get nice but prohibitively expensive places that also look and function like segregation tools increasing and perpetuating inequality, or you get slums that get progressively worsened simply as the time passes. Is there even a middle ground?

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We built a world that genuinely made a generation of people more or less happy.

And it turns out happiness makes you indifferent toward the future and the people who have to live in it.