Quote:
Originally Posted by GGG
Its looking long term at building a sustainable dense city. If a person can afford the SFH in the city they should pay tax on best use, pay tax on the square footage of land and the value of land should be not artifically restrained by zoning rules preventing development.
None of the zoning changes make it better for low income or housing threatened people. What they do is increase the potential supply of desirable housing which over time will have a positive affect on affordability.
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It's that second paragraph that is the most interesting though. In not convinced that this helps with low and affordable housing, and obviously not for many years if it does. But that's what the protests and a chunk of the speakers to council this past week wanted.
And of course, these are complicated issues and there's no one easy to enact policy that fixes everything. But there are still a lot of housing issues in Europe (where it seems like we see less restrictive zoning). I don't know how many cities in North America have really implemented these policies at this time, but I think Houston is the only one. And frankly, they're dealing with the same housing crisis as we are. They went to a full "no zoning" in 1993, and it's a bit of a misnomer because there are some base restrictions, but largely people can build whatever they want. But over the past couple years they had less inventory, prices shooting up and a housing crisis just like we have.