• kameecoding@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    I feel like North America could fix its housing issue by simply abolishing the single family housing zones

    • JasonDJ@lemmy.zip
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      8 months ago

      No. Every American should be able to have 40 acres and a mule.

      What do you mean, that’s more than 5x the total acreage of the US? This is a minor problem, we’ll just make more land or steal some more from the Indians.

      • kameecoding@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        How would you know, North America is literally missing the opportunity to have new development of things other than single family houses or apartment big buildings, bet you there would be a lot of demand for midrises, row houses, mixed neighborhoods in general

      • Hugucinogens@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        8 months ago

        They could also fix it by deregulating the market.

        They could also fix it by doing basically random changes to the law, because the law currently is perpetuating the crisis.

        Fuck it. Put a pen on the jaw of a goat eating grass, and write the result into law. I think we actually have a shot at improvement this way.

        • qwrty@lemmy.world
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          8 months ago

          “deregulation” detected. ready the down votes. /s

          Seriously though, zoning laws are a big reason why we have the current housing crisis. If given the opportunity, someone or some business will build high density housing. But you can’t with he current implementation of zoning laws. Without that barrier, you would see a lot more high density building projects

          Still we do need zoning laws. I don’t think anyone wants a factory or a garbage dump in their back yard. Used correctly zoning also helps limit sprawl.

          • frezik@midwest.social
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            8 months ago

            I think there’s a blind spot on the left for this one. Opening up zoning for higher density is effectively a giveaway to local developers, who are invariably shitbags. It’d be preferable if solutions like banning corporations from owning housing could be enacted.

            That’s based on the theory that there are enough houses and flippers and hedge funds are just sitting on them in order to rake it in later as property values are driven up. If that were true, we’d expect to see large vacancy rates in cities. Problem is, we don’t. My city has <4% vacancy for rentals and <1% for home ownership. This seems to be similar to the numbers in many other major cities in North America. If we got rid of every corporation that was sitting on a house unused, the available housing would go up by 4% or so, at most.

            We need more housing stock. As it stands, the only way to do that is a giveaway to shitbag developers. They’re the ones that hold the capitol for building more housing.

            This could be mitigated by city councils also encouraging/mandating those developers to have unionized staff.