Voting has the possibility of changing zoning laws. For some reason it's just not happening. If these few areas in California and North-East had similar density to cities in other countries it would help a lot.
This issue is much bigger then zoning. It's about redistribution of wealth. Currently there is very little of this happening, yet is it constantly mentioned and threatened to be reduced even further.
Concentration of wealth in the hands of few: this is actually being promoted by all administrations the US has seen in the last decades. If only 80% of the insane military budget could be used to house, feed, cloth and educate EVERY citizen...
Zoning would help primarily in the highest-cost areas. The blog post doesn't specify it, but the problem is mainly in a few major metropolitan areas, not country-wide.
Concentration of wealth is insufficient to explain it:
- there is no lack of cheap housing, however it's outside of main cities
- Concentration of wealth was worse in many moments in history, but that didn't imply in unaffordable real estate (at today's levels)
- Most government regulation works to restrict the supply of housing rather than expand it, even the ones that "theoretically" help with affordability (like rent controls - which I'm not against in some cases).
> The problem is that everyone is trying to concentrate their wealth
Here you see people as individuals.
> and that only the wealthy have the means to achieve it.
And here you distinguish classes.
I think this is a class issue, with at the top level: the "wealthy to the extend that you do not have to work to survive" at one side, and the "rest of us" on the other side.
Concentrating wealth to the extend that you can scrape by is a joke. This is called scraping by.
I saw this quote once and had to laugh:
"Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat, but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires."
A major part of that issue is the voting population. Only people who have already overcome the "getting housing" hurdle are permitted in the elections that shape zoning laws.
There's still some variance there: homeowners profit from high housing prices, while renters profit from low ones. But even for renters, who theoretically want zoning laws relaxed, it's often not a top issue. Given that "weaken zoning laws" is a broadly conservative position here, weak-zoning candidates are usually blocked by the general liberalism of urban areas.
(And at least where I live, technocratic Democrats who might support progressive policies and weak zoning get crushed by entrenched Democrats with more funding and union endorsements. A viable candidate would need to be technocratic only on zoning laws.)
