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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]It’s always a sign of a mature theory when they cannot provide a clear and objective outcome to measure success.

More units built than population growth? Not enough. Zoning is to blame.

Tens of thousands of units approved but not built? Zoning is to blame.

In order to test your ideas it must be falsifiable. What outcome would prove to you that your ideas don’t work?[/quote]

First, you have to acknowledge that housing is heterogeneous, preferences are heterogeneous, and so different types of housing are imperfect substitutes for each other. Just because a lot of one type of housing is built in some places doesn't mean that "enough" housing is being built of all types in all places.  There is, for example, no way that we can physically build enough SFHs in upper NW DC on existing lot sizes to accommodate future demand for that method of living at current prices.  Essentially 0 such new homes can be built.  Unless demand for that type of living declines faster than population growth, we will probably see price increases for those homes outpace inflation.  Increasing the number of close-in condos relieves the pressure on SFH prices a little, but not entirely because they are only imperfect substitutes for one another.  So, you have to be sure that you are using an appropriate measure of housing prices that compares like for like among the close substitutes to new construction housing.  Average home prices are a fairly imperfect measure for that in markets like DC where the new housing stock looks fairly different from a lot of the existing housing stock.

Second, in places where the supply of close housing substitutes is very elastic, prices are basically only dictated by the cost of building it.  So, increasing costs of construction (including regulatory costs) can push up prices even if zoning is a complete non-issue. That is also the point at which builders have no incentive to build up to the limits of zoning, since additional new housing could drive prices below the cost of production.  I still don't know where you're claiming that this is happening, but this can happen in places where regulatory costs of construction are unusually high.  Reducing those non-zoning regulatory costs would lead to an increase in construction and a corresponding decline in housing prices.

Third, everything I have said is absolutely testable and falsifiable, in fact there is a whole literature on this.  You just have to acknowledge that at a micro level, it is usually very difficult to disentangle supply and demand side factors.  Housing is built in the places and forms where it is easiest/cheapest to build (because of available/cheaper land or less restrictive zoning). It's also more likely to be built in the places where demand for housing and for that type of housing is strongest (e.g. new large buildings close to job centers). And, new housing often comes with new local amenities that could help push nearby prices up rather than down because of corresponding increased demand.  At the metro level some of these things average out and so you can infer some things from changes in average prices, but at a local level in places where lots of supply is being built it's a big problem.  So, in order to empirically measure what the demand for housing looks like, you just need to find instances when the supply of housing in a local market changed unexpectedly.  Basically, a shock to the supply curve lets you trace out the shape of demand curve, and vice versa.  There are a number of economics papers that have done this with things like unexpected construction delays (Asquith and Reed 2020) and building fires (Pennington 2020).  They find, very clearly, that new construction reduces surrounding home prices.[/quote]
I ain’t reading all that
I’m happy for u tho
Or sorry that happened [/quote]

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