The latest support for the position that land use, and zoning is destroying our cities . . .

This San Francisco council member has a clever idea to address the coastal housing shortage

. . . comes from progressives! Wut? 

Once the progressives climb on board you can bet the problem is bad, Major Kong rides the bomb bad . . . 

​Oh, there's more after the break!

"Except in the real world, restrictions on construction clearly do have a cost. They result in less construction employment, lower population, and a smaller tax base and impact the availability of houses and workers throughout the region. But the way American cities do business, these kinds of costs simply aren't considered when zoning rules are made, meaning there's no check on indulging the regulatory whims of anti-development busybodies."

Out of the mouths of babes! Welcome to the fight Matty. This one will be long and hard, the Boomers home values are supported by these laws, and the likelihood they will change them without a serious fight is nil.

"In an influential 1976 paper, Harvey Molotch wrote of "The City as Growth Machine," explaining that a powerful coalition of real estate interests, building trade unions, and public sector workers controlled urban politics and pushed it on a trajectory to ever more building.

Actual experience shows this is not the case. While Molotch's growth machine coalition does tend to mobilize around a handful of high-profile projects — often stadiums, convention centers, or redevelopment schemes focused on waterfront industrial areas — the vast majority of land use decisions go the other way. Instead of a growth machine, cities see a series of decisions made on a local basis generally in response to very parochial concerns about street parking and "neighborhood character" that completely ignore citywide economic impact."

Molotch was right, of course. Until the 1970s cities were the engine of growth, just look at Detroit, a truly shining example. But beginning in the 1980s that all began to change. Gee, I wonder what happened about then? Ok, I'll give it away. The Boomers came of age and began to agitate for stupid shiite is what happened. And they were becoming wealthy enough to own homes in great numbers, and valued anything that enriched them personally above all else. So home price increases took precedence over reasonableness, logic, or civic values. NIMBY is just the Boomers protecting what is theirs at the expense of most everyone else.

"Farrell's statement on his initiative discusses this explicitly and sees the forthcoming report as part of contributing to this new body of conventional wisdom:

The discussion around the impacts of zoning and land-use regulations, especially in coastal cities, has started in earnest as research and studies have been released from economists at University of California Berkeley, the University of Chicago, and from the Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors for the White House. Early research and studies suggest that overly restrictive zoning and land-use regulations do have far-reaching impacts on housing costs, economic inequality, mobility, and productivity.

Kevin Honan, who represents parts of Boston in the Massachusetts assembly, is championing legislation that would force Boston-area cities and towns to change zoning to allow for infill development. New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio pushed a major citywide zoning overhaul that should allow for more construction. California's official Legislative Analyst's Office has analyzed the state's housing affordability crisis as largely a product of overly restrictive zoning."

Who would ever have guessed that limiting supply of land in the face of increasing demand would cause prices to rise? Why would anyone need studies to show this? It is a basic bedrock economic principle, but progressives are always surprised when these bedrock principles actually operate the way everyone else knows, and accepts they work. 

Also note how the progressive "cure" for the problem is worse than the problem. Boston apparently has a housing affordability issue, unsurprising since Boston is a very progressive city. But the proposed solution is . . . wait for it . . . infill development. So, the solution to housing unaffordability is to increase the traffic congestion in Boston? The real problem with infill development is that it increases the density of the area without the ability to increase the amount or size of roadways. There are many other problems but that is for another discussion.

A better alternative would be to relax the land use and zoning rules and allow people to live where they wish. But no, the progressive answer is to shoehorn more people into an overcrowded area, and live with the massive traffic congestion increases. Oh, and public transit, because its always public transit. No, no one will use the increased public transit, but hey, it's a government expense, so someones budget will increase and have more employees, and that means more power, pay and perks for that bureaucrat! 

Even when a progressive has an epiphany they invariably follow a new policy down the same, or a similar rat hole. Just stop, the answer is individual liberty