I always find this funny because the most “big builder” dominated market is single family detached. Apartments are incredibly fragmented in terms of construction in ownership.
This is a town hall of Connecticut NIMBYs trying to stop high speed rail from being built nearby. These are the folks fighting for restrictive zoning; an apartment building could cause traffic and noise, invite the "wrong sort" and ruin the "charm of the neighborhood".
Another solution is that housing developers are generally not MBAs, and there are so many of them spread all over the place that it makes it hard for them to collude than in markets with fewer firms.
Also, Lina's Jaeger should have shoulder mounted rockets, those things are sick.
I think it comes from 70s new leftism, there's a universal thesis that everything bad is caused by "corporations" who all work together and are only motivated by doing bad things to you personally
It’s a real deal problem for making money in the industry that builders are naturally optimists and do dumb things
The *Function* of urban planning is to enforce a shortage that highly competitive, kinda over-exuberant real estate guys could not hope to sustain on their own
To your point: progressive planners realized early on that zoning’s importation to the US was not used to curb land speculation (ie Central Europe) as they had hoped but to sustain and enhance land values to benefit of real estate investors.
Not sure if it's the optimal solution to this specifically, but as a rule I'm going to approve any solution that ends up with Lina Khan having a gundam.
Conflation of "down" with "down to so cheap that everyone can have one" which competition empirically fails to do very often that's why we do a lot of fucking around with transfers and subsidies and shit
To settle the housing part of this can't we just point to Austin and show that they are in fact doing price wars after building enough enough. The housing market is too many players to do what they're thinking!
Thought I guess I do live in a neighborhood that proves planned walkable density 1. Is attractive 2. Works well when integrated to the existing town 3. NIMBYs will go absolutely insane no matter how much benefit your development brings without inconveniencing them 4. Is expensive af without subsidy.
Is there a name for the fundamental instability in discourse where people who care about correctness spend most of their energy arguing with their own camp whereas the people who don't give a shit are in lockstep and bulldoze the former.
Evidence pretty conclusively shows the first one is true.
Anyone saying that zoning reform won't lower housing costs without antitrust enforcement is just plain wrong. Billionaire developers aren't in the business of ADUs and infill duplexes. It's a totally different market.
Also the big firms "buying up all the housing and turning them into rentals" say in their SEC/shareholder filings that they target areas with strict zoning that are unlikely to allow more housing development
When zone reform happens, you may be delighted to get a debate like in Germany, just substitute "zoning reform" with "increased supply".
Of course completly isn the abstract hence technically true but completely unhelpful
Comments
The largest rental builder in 2023 completed… 8k units. Builders 2 - 6 collectively built 7,682.
Also which apartment / condo builders are household names compared to detached SFH builders?
Also, Lina's Jaeger should have shoulder mounted rockets, those things are sick.
The *Function* of urban planning is to enforce a shortage that highly competitive, kinda over-exuberant real estate guys could not hope to sustain on their own
Somehow zoning defenders today miss this.
Ok, but… empirically it does.
“Yes, but my theory!”
Anyone saying that zoning reform won't lower housing costs without antitrust enforcement is just plain wrong. Billionaire developers aren't in the business of ADUs and infill duplexes. It's a totally different market.
They are very literally the same thing.
ZONING REFORM IS NECESSARY BUT NOT SUFFICIENT
Of course completly isn the abstract hence technically true but completely unhelpful