YIMBYs and Affordable Housing

I trust in markets to do the right thing....when allowed to.

I don't get the vacant land in the West thing. Land is needed in just a few counties and there is no way to move empty land from Nevada desert to Manhattan Island or Manhattan beach. The 99%-tile most expensive county in the USA (Arlington VA) has land for $140K per acre. With correct zoning the price of a housing unit to the cost of land is about 50 to 1, which is in the noise.

DonG (Here.We.Go.) (View Comment):

I trust in markets to do the right thing….when allowed to.

I don’t get the vacant land in the West thing. Land is needed in just a few counties and there is no way to move empty land from Nevada desert to Manhattan Island or Manhattan beach. The 99%-tile most expensive county in the USA (Arlington VA) has land for $140K per acre. With correct zoning the price of a housing unit to the cost of land is about 50 to 1, which is in the noise.

Vast swaths of empty Federal land are largely a western state issue. There are fewer opportunities East of the Mississippi.

It's less a matter of the cost of the available land as a matter of the lack of land available for sale.

In my native San Diego, California, I'll give you some examples. Look at the crossing of the 805 and 905 highways just north of the border with Mexico. There are two square miles of perfectly usable land surrounded by dense city. Further north along the eastern side of the 125 there is another three or four square miles, thousands of acres, of great land similarly left to grow wild and burst into wildfires every few years.

The empty land that remains for sale is scrap land on the edges of canyons, so expensive that nothing is built except for luxury mansions and apartment blocks. Everything else built today requires you to buy something at the top of the market, wait years for a demolition permit, then build something new.

Once you go ten miles inland from the coast you find several (eastern) states worth of empty land, stretching almost to the border with Arizona.

mildlyo (View Post):

The article ends with this excellent paragraph.

A conservative alternative would emphasize: We are going to move opportunity closer to where Americans already live; we are going to shape demand so that families, not financiers or foreigners, set the pace of the market; and we are going to make it possible again for a young father with an ordinary job to buy a single-family home. This should be the foundation of a pro-family, pro-nation policy program that takes voters’ preferences seriously and gives them a concrete reason to trust conservatives with power.

Love this. I have been fascinated by China's empty "ghost" cities that no one wants to live in (video, three minutes). It's housing, it's new, and it should appeal to people, but it doesn't. These huge fake cities sit empty.

There are a lot of problems in the design of these concrete cities--they are cold and not human scale--but the real problem is that they were not built where anyone wants to live. People want to be reasonably close to other people, preferably people they know and have something in common with.

The ghost cities are what happens when centralized governments do things. The projects fail--Stalin's Five Year Plans and Mao's Great Leap Forward--on a spectacular level. No one wants what the government has spent money on. They spend money they have forcibly taken from people. They have more than they know what to do with. They end up spending it ridiculously because they can.

Growth has to rise up from small groups like families, then neighborhoods. That's what made the New England colony so strong: lots of tiny strong autonomous towns that, now and then, got together for temporary purposes as they needed to. Little independent churches and towns.

That was the true miracle in our country. Those strong individual towns were independent, each on its own. No one ordered them to do anything. When they acted together, they acted of their own free will and strong commitment. And it's what no other country has ever been able to replicate.

In America, the supply and price of houses and other consumer goods and services is not the concern of the government. There will always be citizens who want stuff that someone else has, and costs more than they are willing and able to pay. That isn’t a reason for the government to intervene.

The Republicans don’t need to try to beat the Democrats in a race to complete socialism and cultural Marxism. They need to offer an alternative to these evils.

Mark Camp (View Comment):

In America, the supply and price of houses and other consumer goods and services is not the concern of the government. There will always be citizens who want stuff that someone else has, and costs more than they are willing and able to pay. That isn’t a reason for the government to intervene.

The Republicans don’t need to try to beat the Democrats in a race to complete socialism and cultural Marxism. They need to offer an alternative to these evils.

Land that remains open today is such for a reason. In cities and surrounding subdivisions, etc. government regulations required inclusion of open spaces, undeveloped "green" areas for the environmentalists, starting in the '60's. So there's the matter of governmental interference.

Out west, towns exist, or don't exist, where they do, for a reason. And when / if the reason goes away, so do the people. There are plenty ghost towns around to attest to that. If the government wants to put up "affordable housing" in the middle of the Mojave Desert, have at it! The people can spend their time exploring the ghost towns, since there isn't anything else for them to do. Oh, wait! Any such project will be sidelined for decades, or longer, due to lawsuits brought on behalf of the chuckwallas, desert tortoises, desert rats, sidewinders, burros, saguaro, cholla and prickly pear cactuses, etc. etc.

And what open space remains can be covered by solar panels to provide power for these new communities. What a concept!