Sightline Institute is a Pacific Northwest think tank writing on housing, zoning, transportation, and low-carbon cities.
HN commenters recommend it as a charity looking into high real estate prices, and cite it for housing reform, parking mandates, and regional fuel data.
I admit that “supply and demand” is not the cause of the housing crisis. It merely explains the high price of housing (with minor contributions from a bunch of other factors[0][1]). I feel that supply and demand is most useful as an intuitive appeal to balance: There is way more demand than supply,[2] of course we suffer from a shortage. The cause of the crisis is the array of regulations against homebuilding, that caused the shortage.
As you say, developers build in times of increasing demand, yet there hasn’t been a real building boom since the early 1990s.[3] In a normal situation, increasing prosperity would bring both jobs and homes to an area. Here, we have the jobs but not the homes.[4]
The developers intimately know how price is caused by supply and demand, and do not build unless they are reasonably certain that they can make a profit. They avoid causing gluts. The problem here is that California has some of the most misguided regulations,[5][6] and municipalities some of the worst processes,[7][8] that prevent housing from being affordable to build.[9] Developers can’t be certain to make back their investment when housing is not in crisis, and we need to fix this.
Like sea urchins in a kelp desert,[10] mega-developers with large projects are not the core issue. Mega-developers work best when trampling over pristine wilderness. We need to build inside cities.[11] The core issue is that we collectively do not have the imagination to enable thousands of small-time…
Piecing together the story from https://pedestrianobservations.com and other places, I would not imitate Japan in this regard.
- Japan's terrain is fairly ideal for rail. Yes, mountains make for more work, put people are also naturally congregated near the coast, in valleys, etc. Additionally, the largest cities with the high population form a linear chain from roughly Nagasaki to Tokyo. That means more network effects per distance of rail (there's no penalty separate than time delay for traveling through other cities first).
- Japan has perhaps the best policy around land use in the developed world. See https://www.sightline.org/2021/03/25/yes-other-countries-do-housing-better-case-1-japan/ for some details. This helps greatly with density and clustering around rail stations.
- The privatization was triggered by the fright around Japan's big deficits after the 80s boom, and perhaps still maintained with some fear of that. That doesn't make it a good idea, of course, but I'm willing to call it more "defensive neoliberalism" than "offensive neoliberalism", but maybe that makes it a little less ideological given that Japan was the poster child for all the neoclassical economic doomsday predictions?
- https://pedestrianobservations.com in particular says the privatization and and general being spooked about more debt holds back some construction on paper, but since the rail is so well established already and operationally profitable, there is less to screw up.
In…
The HOA or landlord can modify the terms, but they're disincentivized to do so.
The reason that both HOAs and landlords disallow outdoor clothes drying is that it's seen as an eyesore. People associate clotheslines full of clothes with images of testaments in NYC in the 1920s and representing overpopulation and or immigration.
Landlords in particular don't want people hanging things from the apartments- even objects like small satellite dishes are often not allowed.
What many don't know is that in the US, many of these rules are simply null and void:
https://www.sightline.org/2012/02/21/clothesline-bans-void-in-19-states/
The challenge is that this requires a great deal of work on the part of the homeowner, and in doing so they would be entering into a conflict with the HOA. They would win in a court, but they would need to put up the money to fight in court. Even if/when they won, the HOA would make life unpleasant for them and likely retaliate in some other way.
Ok the article was a guest post on the blog by a guy named Aaron Carr which I take is this guy
https://www.linkedin.com/in/aaroncarrny/
who seems to be some sort of reasonable expert on homelessness, the article has a lot of sections with stuff like this
>Furthermore, if mental health were the main driver of homelessness, places with the most mental illness would have the most homelessness. However, the data shows the exact opposite:
followed by a scatterplot graph Rate of Serious Mental Illness Versus PIT Count (per capita)
with links to the source of the graph for example this https://www.sightline.org/2022/03/16/homelessness-is-a-housing-problem/
So, what is your actual problem with 'this dude'? Or the 'content' that has been 'created'?
on edit: I could totally understand (without necessarily agreeing) if your post was "this guy looks like someone trying to increase funding for their organization by cherry-picking stats to support a tenuous case"
Some of it is simply a regional transport issue. The major Russian oil importers appear to be the Pacific Northwest states, by far:
https://www.sightline.org/2022/03/04/pacific-northwest-states-paid-700-million-for-russian-oil-last-year-alone/
> "The refineries do not rely on Russian oil equally. Nearly 60 percent of Russian crude imported to Washington went to the Tesoro/Marathon Anacortes refinery, and another 29 percent went to the BP Ferndale refinery. Russian crude made up almost 7 percent of all crude refined at the Tesoro/Marathon Anacortes refinery from 2009 through 2021."
Getting oil from Bakken or Pennsylvania would likely be expensive, and also refineries are optimized to process specific grades/types of crude oil. The best solution would be for the US government to prioritize the transition to renewables in Oregon and Washington.
I was in SF yesterday for the first time in about eight years. I can't say I witnessed crimes, but I will say that the homelessness problem is much, much worse than I remember. It's hard to see any of these problems changing without it becoming cheaper to live in the city, and without more housing, I don't know how that's a possibility.
I see a lot of people talking about how people are homeless because of addiction or mental health problems, and there are certainly people who are homeless because of those reasons. That being said, homelessness seems to track much more closely with housing availability than social policies[0]. SF is such a beautiful city — it's sad to see all this abject poverty throughout it.
0: https://www.sightline.org/2022/03/16/homelessness-is-a-housing-problem/