I think I misunderstood your earlier comment that I replied to - I was under the impression you were against the change and were talking about how "nobody should be banned from buying a single family home here" as if people were about to be banned from buying SFH's.

My bad! We're in agreement.

I feel like a lot of people have a misconception about this headline.

It’s not banning single family homes.

It’s banning exclusionary zoning. You can still have single family homes, but you will also be able to build other things as well on that land you own.

Your home isn’t getting fucking outlawed dude.

Why do you think that people are going to build apartment complexes that don’t get rented out? That’s not how things generally work. They develop these things because they are in demand and make money.

It’s highly in demand to have more, cheaper, rentals available in cities, to provide for more people. There will be 5 people moving in for every person moving out because they just really wanted a single family home.

Single family zoning is literally just government authoritarianism. Let markets decide how they want to build housing. If you don’t want to live in an apartment you don’t have to, but you also don’t get to dictate how other people use the land beyond reasonable health and safety restrictions (I.e. limiting pollution and heavy industry). That’s how it should be.

Right, so it's entirely a self-inflicted issue of simply not being willing to build more housing. That's basically my whole point. Housing crises in the developed world are almost all because people just refuse to allow enough housing to be built, because the existing homeowners don't want to see their equity drop, or even just "stop going up as much," or worse yet, they'll claim it's to preserve historically relevant plots of dirt and bricks, and starve everyone else out.

Japan is a notable exception to this occurrence. They build more housing per capita than most developed countries, and the idea of housing being an investment rather than a commodity is not nearly as common there. As a result their real estate markets have been way flatter than most other developed countries. Also related is their national zoning laws which are amazing and every country should replicate them 1-to-1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wfm2xCKOCNk

Who said the state has to do this? Haven't you ever heard of like, selling houses?

Just allow developers to actually buy up land where 500 year old townhouses are and build highrise apartment complexes there. They'll buy out the owners of the land/houses that are willing to sell, and your city expands. This is literally how urbanization works.

You can't just indefinitely preserve all the ancient crap in a city just because it's pretty and then expect the city to never have issues with growth and modernization. Just literally allow people to bulldoze some of this stuff and invest in your city.

There are over 2mil dwellings in the Sydney area, this is not 1/3rd, it's like 8%-9%.

Build some more hotels and houses, this is literally Australia's megacity, it's their New York, of course there's huge demand for both permanent and temporary/tourist housing. People will eventually migrate to other areas if the city doesn't figure out how to build enough, and that's fine, too. Migration to and from cities is normal and healthy. New York City hasn't had population growth in like 60 years or some shit because it can't expand much more and isn't a very economically desirable place to live for a lot of people as a result, to say nothing of the midwest cities that have all been seeing their populations drop since the mid 20th century.

If a city has enormous demand, build more supply. That's literally your only solution. Rent controls don't work, it's been tried and tried and tried again. Your one and only solution is to build more. It will take time and people will have to leave the city if they can't afford to stay there. That is normal and that is just what happens. Sydney will learn to cope. Cities don't infinitely grow, sometimes they shrink or stagnate while they figure themselves out.

Np! I realized that this post was actually about the Netherlands so I probably am getting some people in this thread confused lol

This is completely untrue for the USA (this comment chain is talking about the USA - that's mostly what I'm talking about), look up anything to do with the Bay Area and San Francisco when it comes to the legendary NIMBYism in that area. They do things like preserve "historic" laundromats and parking lots to avoid building multi-hundred unit apartment complexes (and of course, a good 20% or more of those would always be relegated for affordable housing - this would do nothing but help the city and its residents.)

No idea about the Netherlands' specific issues, to be fair.

You can build denser. Build more high-rises.

Yeah, when you run up against literal physical limitations, sometimes you have to choose between either having nice traditional-ish single family homes (or town-houses), or having more apartment/condo complexes - alternatively you cope with sky-high housing prices and a lack of ability for successive generations to have solid housing situations.

Most countries in the world don't have this problem though. The USA reeeeally doesn't.

This is literally just not true. Most houses are not corporate owned. Not even close. It's a few more percent than it was a few years ago.

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You know what can cause this to drop? Building so much housing that you crash the market. Nobody wants to build tons of housing because all the homeowners vote against it because it tanks their equity values. You think that corporations are the big baddy, they aren't, it's HOA's and the fucks in the suburbs and shit that vote against every possible expansion or densification of anything because their primary concern is their equity, not your chances of homeownership. Vote YIMBY's into your local government. That is your only savior.

>One third of houses in my country are empty

Source needed

Some vacancy is required in a healthy market, no vacancies means no supply, but 1/3rd being completely empty and unused sounds pretty unlikely, I'd like to see the source for that number.

So in other words "the more desirable places to live are more expensive because demand is huge."

Shocker.

Anyway, just build more housing. There is a direct and obvious connection between NIMBYism and expensive housing prices.