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Originally Posted by Slava
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.
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I agree that council used the current crisis to push through long term systemic changes that won’t immediately help the current crisis.
The US is in a much healthier housing state than we are by most metrics. I think to evaluate the success or failure of zoning initiatives you’d really need a comparison of a like city in the US that didn’t change zoning rules.
The more important thing that increasing density does is that long term it reduces infrastructure costs to the city.