alt Hacker NewsThat part is the obvious part. I want to know how they got all the entrenched landowners to let new builds in their neighborhoods and drive down values. The NIMBYs are usually the problem.
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If you are an owner of rental houses, I would think that it's in your interest to be able to build ADUs on those properties. Even if everyone does it and prices go down a bit you're still making a lot more per property than you were before, assuming reasonable building costs (and if building costs are not reasonable then not many owners will be building ADUs and prices won't go down).
Unfortunately, it's not actually obvious. There are heaps of people, even and especially in the most expensive housing markets in the US, who will outright argue that supply and demand doesn't apply to housing.
Well, once you loosen up building codes to allow apartment buildings instead of single family homes then suddenly the developers will come with a lot of cash to buy those homes from NIMBYs. And cash is always convincing.
Maybe renters were such a crazy high percent that despite the fact they were all wrapped up in their jobs and children vs retirees with nothing else to do in their $1M house than show up to meeting to influence the political apparatus they they still finally balanced out at the planning and zoning meetings.
California passed a number of laws protecting landowners’ ability to build ADUs, and the San Diego council super-charged those:
https://calmatters.org/housing/2023/11/adu-san-diego/
Tons of San Diego houses have a ton of land thanks to the mid-20th century lawn fetish back when everyone was pretending that there was enough water so there are a lot of places where someone can turn some dead grass into as many as 5 ADUs.