i'm not advocating stopping sprawl, at least not in this conversation. in a US context, the argument that capital discipline / landbanking is a housing constraint is mostly about being a constraint on sprawl, so implicitly maybe i'm criticizing the blocking of sprawl. 1/

(i do want to encourage dense rather than less-dense new development. i'd prefer public action to build new dense places rather than private restriction of "sprawl'. i don't know if there are restrictions of low-density sprawl i'd support, but the experience of eg Boulder wld make me cautious.) /fin

sometimes quantities really matter. if you’re trying to alter behavior with subsidies, the subsidies have to be of the same order of magnitude of not just the direct costs, but the opportunity costs. 1/

the nordics largely cover the direct costs, and it helps at the margin, but no one comes close to matching opportunity costs. /fin

you will catch me in some inconsistencies, in that then i was not so sold on density, i was fine with American suburbanization (even if i liked cities), and thought there were few barriers to mcmansions as far as the interstate would go. 1/

now i oppose mcmansion-land (both environmental and sociological reasons now strike me as more compelling than then), so what looked like a decent, achievable, mostly private sector path then no longer strikes me as desirable. /fin

I don’t know what they mean / meant to build. One of many reasons to prefer open, public projects to stealth initiatives by plutocrats. 1/

(Yes, I hope they do get it built, and that it is reasonably dense. I don’t want to let the perfect or my ideological priors be the enemy of the good. But the approach they took was crap, and the political resistance predictable and understandable.) /fin

no. one of the advantages of public projects is they take risks private projects will not, ie they can be politic about circumventing objections of dug-in homeowners and still finance new districts at scale where objections aren’t so strong. 1/

that doesn’t mean there isn’t a lot of regulatory reform that should happen! it doesn’t mean regulatory reform wouldn’t help publicly finance projects. it would! 2/

but it does mean the state is held less hostage to regulatory reform than developers trying to do infill in desirable places. 3/

and to me, the causality is more likely to go from more-public-sector-led development to regulatory reform (as incumbent homeowners become less threatened) than the other way around. /fin

i agree with where you want to go! i usually support “missing middle” reforms. ( see drafts.interfluidity.com/2024/06/13/y... ) 1/

land use reforms can help housing supply at certain margins. “doesn’t hurt” new supply (though may be accompanied by different harms). but i think people who imagine land use reforms will succeed at anything like the scale of our current and near-future housing deficit are badly mistaken. /fin

I agree that landlords and homeowners sometimes act cartelishly. but that is supportable despite their numbers because production is not their business, not how they gain, it’s someone else’s opportunity. ADUs subverts the homeowner cartel by making homeowners also potential developers. 1/

Housing development is also an industry that can be and often is cartelishly consolidated. Lots of groups behave cartelishly, nearly every industry will if they can! /fin