I don't think its onerous safety regulations that limit affordable housing. Its a well documented phenomenon that housing policy is driven to protect past buyers over future ones (NIMBY, using zoning laws to limit density of housing, minimal acreage in cities etc).
A combination of loosening up zoning laws around residential buildings and a land value tax would do lots to facilitate affordable housing, but nobody wants to disrupt current homeowners on behalf of renters and future buyers
You are talking about an entirely different situation of building in an existing neighborhood, not what GP described. If affordable housing is your goal then would not it be better to have it somewhere instead of insisting that either it has to be near the evil NIMBY's houses or not at all? Many people would be fine with a cheap SFH in suburbs instead of a micro-apartment in the middle of downtown.
I see you interchanged the words I actually used "onerous regulations" and instead addressed "onerous safety regulations." Nowhere in the comment you replied to is the word "safety" found.
But it is true a lot of regulations are made in the name of "safety." What these fail to account for, is that many of these regulations increase expense, so there are tradeoffs such as those who lose healthcare or education opportunities by instead spending it making housing more safe (thus, they may actually become less safe by having a safer house). Or even worse, people who end up homeless because although they could have built an "unsafe" shack, the regulations in all their wisdom deem it's better to be dead of the elements on the street than to live in a sub-par structure.
> Its a well documented phenomenon that housing policy is driven to protect past buyers over future ones (NIMBY, using zoning laws to limit density of housing, minimal acreage in cities etc).
>A combination of loosening up zoning laws around residential buildings and a land value tax would do lots to facilitate affordable housing, but nobody wants to disrupt current homeowners on behalf of renters and future buyers
Agree on all accounts here, the stars really align against new entrants.
A combination of loosening up zoning laws around residential buildings and a land value tax would do lots to facilitate affordable housing, but nobody wants to disrupt current homeowners on behalf of renters and future buyers