The sad reality is that a lot of the people who shout the loudest about the problems of wealth and systemic inequality with their words, do very little or even the opposite with their actions.
There's probably similar psychology at play as to why it's common advice to not tell people about your personal goals. The act of proclaiming what you want to do gives you that little kick of dopamine that saps your motivation for actually doing it, making it less likely that you'll actually follow through. Waiting until after your accomplishment to share your success is much more effective.
In the case of moral virtue signalling, it seems like the act of proclaiming your virtue is much more likely to give you a feeling of moral license that makes you feel ok about acting immorally to serve your self interest.
In short, be suspicious of people who virtue signal too much, and judge them by their actions and results, not by their words or intent.
This answer is thoroughly irrelevant to Seattle. Just throw up more low cost suburban divisions? Where? Nearly every square foot of land between the ocean and the mountains is already built on for a 100 mile stretch up and down the coast.
It seems like a complete waste of time to try to declare a political victory here.
I'd like to find statistics on this. I'm less familiar with Texas than Florida, and my firsthand experience with Florida has me curious. I drove from Georgia to South Florida recently and saw lots of new development, including high rises and other multi family dwelling all over central and south Florida. Even the single family neighborhoods I saw were on average denser than what I am used to in Georgia. Florida may not be developing at the same density as NYC, but it is not all single family homes either.
Texas is building six times as much housing as Arkansas, Louisiana, and Oklahoma combined (all of the other states in their Census Bureau region). So what's the answer?
People want to move to Texas #1, the places the parent comment posted are much more dense where people actually want to live. Buffalo, NY doesn’t have the same issues as NYC and Springfield, IL isn’t Chicago.
California has plenty of land. San Francisco is hardly a dense city. Seattle manages to build lots of housing, despite sharing many of the same challenges: costal city with limited land, earthquakes,etc. But development and housing policy is very different.
California, especially the bay Area, is notorious for being anti-development. The landed class will furiously fight any attempt to build dense housing, to keep property prices high. Rent control exacerbates this as most residents have no incentive to solve the housing shortage since they aren't affected by price increases.
Washington, by contrast, prohibits rent control statewide. It's no coincidence I'm seeing far more construction in Seattle and it's suburbs than I did SF.
I’m just balking at the audacity of comparing Massachusetts to Texas and implying their comparable on the basis of their politics more so than their geography.
Land isn't really a big driver of housing costs. The issue is housing where people want to live. Nobody is balking at the apartment rents out in the countryside, it's rents in desirable metros that people are talking about. The question is, how do you get more housing units in a fixed amount of land? The answer is higher density, and policy that allows the conversion of low density housing to high density housing.
While it is true that nobody is complaining about rural countryside rents, it’s kind of dumb to imply that land isn’t a critical issue. Dallas is like 5-6x bigger than Boston in terms of area, because it can spread out, because it has lots of land. Boston can’t really spread. It’s hilly and forester and has tougher weather. Texas is flat plains.
The point is that it's not a shortage of land. It's not that California as a whole isn't big enough to accommodate it's population. It's that specific desirable places to live are getting more expensive. You concede that this is true when you narrow your statement with "in the California coastal cities."
The problem is that people want to live in the desirable costal cities. The only way that's going to happen is if the city gets more dense. Cities that allow for easy construction are better able to convert low density housing in desirable areas to high density housing to accommodate the growing demand.
People demolishing poor condition or small houses and building high end homes on the land does not in any way demonstrate that buildings have negative value. You're taking an edge case and applying as a generalization. In many of those cases the homeowners are losing money on destroying the old house but prefer that location.
If labor defined the cost, buyers would renovate. If materials defined the cost, buyers would renovate.
The fact that buyers demolish shows that the cost of labor and materials is significantly less than the value of the land. "losing money on destroying the old house but prefer that location" === value of the land is higher than the cost of the rebuild.
That doesn't show that improvements to land have negative value. You're also assuming that landowners always make the most rational value decisions with their properties and that's frankly just not the case. People aren't tearing down high value homes to build new ones, you're only looking at low value ones and applying incorrectly as a generalization to both.
In most real estate transactions where the home is clearly a tear down, it's priced in.
It seems like might have never viewed a property tax bill.
Here's my neighbor's house built in 2022 appraised values:
This doesn’t match my experience although all reports seem to focus on one bedrooms. In my experience most housing, or at least most people, just get room mates and end up finding places much cheaper to live. I also wonder what areas don’t count as Boston despite being on local public transit to the city.
The answer is here, people just don't want it.