alt Hacker NewsAh -- you showed your hand there.
You should be careful saying things like "high housing costs which driven up by overregulation". It sounds like you're trying to frame bad economic news like it's the fault of a more liberal political party in the US.
High housing costs are just an effect of capitalism. It's supply and demand - as simple as that. If they were grass huts in downtown San Fransisco, they'd be just as expensive. "Overregulation" is a fallacy.
Replies
It's not as simple as that. The supply is being kept low to enrich housing investors.
People in New York City don't talk as often about how difficult building is because of NIMBYism. Generally it's a combination of red tape that's meant to act as a protection from things like fires and bad construction, which is good, environmental regulations which is so-so (some of them drive up housing costs), because of progressive policies (demanding a certain percentage of units be for lower income people), a scarcity of land, high wages, and a political class tied to unions (the latest tax breaks are tied to 50 dollar min wage for new construction of 99 units or more).
It's very very complicated. And new construction makes rents go up here because it's all luxury - it has to be, or developers won't bother to build.
It's so complicated that I'm sick of reading the West Coasters hot take on housing problems - that it's 100 percent due to single family homes and zoning and other very very California problems.
Guys, we're not all in California.
I live in an unregulated county and I just built a house for $60,000.
I've found a few plots of land in San Francisco where you could put my house on where the land itself is under $200,000. So $260,000. So why doesn't anyone do this? It's $200,000 in profit easy since you could sell it for $460,000+ easy. Capitalists just hate making money? Clearly there is regulation stopping it, otherwise developers would be buying $50k boxables or the cheapest manufactured house they could drop down off a trailer and making an absolute mint on all the slivers of cheaper land you can find for sale in these upper priced cities.
When I was in the planning phase of building my house I quickly identified only a few counties in my state where it was even possible to build a house all myself without regulatory inspections. The only reason why I have a house is because I found a place with no regulatory inspections for owner-builder housing which allowed me to bypass codes, engineering, building plans, and licensing.
Zoning is regulation. Prop 13 in California is regulation. Regulations can reduce supply and drive up prices. The Bay Area is proof of this.