Housing Bubble 2: Return of the Ugly

This is what drives me crazy every time I hear people talking about needing to build more housing.

There are regional housing shortages. The classic example is in Northern California (particularly around San Fransisco and San Jose) where you've got these huge tracks of ranch-style homes and barely any vertical development. A lot of that is due to the seismic activity in the region, making taller buildings more expensive to construct. But more is due to the historical development practices of throwing up a thousand cheepo ticky-tacky units on real estate they acquired dirt-cheap from the state and flipped as fast as possible. Now the land is developed as this low-traffic sprawl, and people are obsessed with propping up their land-value to justify the seven figure notes their carrying. So building denser housing is politically and logistically prohibitive.

Basically, the problem isn't a housing shortage so much as a shit job of urban planning. Yes, houses exist, but they're hours away from job sites with no quality mass transit to move people between residence and work. No, you can't just pile people into these low-occupancy (often badly maintained) units if they don't have the kind of money to afford their own cars, pay for childcare, afford the utilities, cover maintenance of the units, etc, etc. That's a recipe for slums.

At some level, you need to actually plan your residential economy. That's a harder kind of work that politicians and bureaucrats elected based on their cool Tweets and Instagram feeds don't really want to do.