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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]If there was a way for governments to create lots of affordable housing in places where many people want to live, they would have figured it out by now.

People act like these issues are new, but cities like New York have been dealing with these questions for at least 150 years. And yet NYC is the (or among the) most expensive housing markets in the US (and also the most densely populated).

Folks on this thread seem to think there's easy answers here, but if there were, someone or some place, like NYC, would have already done it by now. [/quote]

This. [/quote]

Er, NYC has politics too. And zoning.  And NIMBYs.

Its also got a huge concentration of jobs. Much bigger than DC.  And its housing construction has NOT kept pace with job growth. Which has been said over and over, and the folks KEEP reciting the talking point "Well NYC IS dense and expensive".   Zombie talking point that has been shown to be misleading again and again.

Is there a bot writing the NIMBY talking points? [/quote]

i think the general notion here is that increasing density is not a new idea. just because it's a hot topic with you and your friends down at the student union doesnt mean no one else has thought of it before. "cities need lots of housing," is not some incredible insight. cities have been getting more dense for decades, and yet none have become oases of affordable housing. if increasing density was the answer, why isn't there a single example anywhere of it working? why isn't there a single large city where lots of people want to live, where affordable housing is plentiful? to say, "well, everyone is just doing is wrong and they should really just be listening to me" is not very satisfying.  [/quote]

The notion of reforming restrictive zoning is relatively new - really only in the debate the last ten years at most.  NYC got a lot of its density before restrictive zoning even became a thing.  So your presentation of history is not really accurate.

As for examples the most dramatics is Tokyo.

https://marketurbanismreport.com/blog/tokyos-affordable-housing-strategy-build-build-build

[i]Consider a recent Financial Times article about the 13.6-million-person Japanese capital. Like so many other global first-world cities, Tokyo is experiencing explosive population growth, increasing by 1.6 million people since 2000. And unlike practically every U.S. city, it has almost no empty land. So it has responded through vertical growth, tearing down old structures and replacing them with high rises at a pace light-years ahead of anywhere in modern America. As FT's Tokyo bureau chief Robin Harding wrote in the article, the city had 142,417 housing starts in 2014, which was “more than the 83,657 housing permits issued in the state of California (population 38.7m), or the 137,010 houses started in the entire country of England (population 54.3m)." Compare this, also, with the roughly 20,000 new residential units approved annually in New York City, the 23,500 units started in Los Angeles County, and the measly 5,000 homes constructed in 2015 throughout the entire Bay Area.

[b]This has stabilized Tokyo's housing prices, wrote Harding, and has kept them far lower than in many U.S. cities.[/b][/i]

Of course someone will explain that is not a model because they are culturally different from us.

Any place that has succeeded will be explained as different - until we are left with the US and other places that have similar restrictive zoning.

Fact is no US cities have massively reformed zoning. Minneapolis and Seattle have taken big steps, but I think its too soon to judge the results. [/quote]

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