By Eric Law
I have written the following document that consolidates citable quotes countering the YIMBY discussion points with sourced reference material. I’ve assembled them into themes that can be used to emphasize specific points. (I have most of the reference materials soft copy as well.)
While most YIMBY shills can’t be persuaded to read and would likely melt down when confronted with a 50-page academic economic treatise, there is a slice of influential people who might be persuaded to consider a different policy track when confronted with actual data and analysis.
I hope that includes our legislators/ city council members. I continue to add to this information repository as I read and analyze more information.
The above contains some good citable quotes, I’m here to learn and have an open and honest discussion, but here is what I have to say about this point. “Single Family residential zoning does not increase house prices”
I thought I’d do in the format of this post, quotes from studies and research papers. Truth fears no investigation, and sound science invites questioning.
“More single-family homes and bigger lots equal better affordability.” That is a demand story, not a supply story. Cheap metros with lots of detached houses tend to be places fewer people are fighting to live in. In high-demand metros, walling off most residential land for one house per lot throttles unit count and pushes up land cost per home. LA is exhibit A. Roughly 74 percent of its residentially zoned land is single-family only, yet the median sale price sits around 1.1 million dollars. That is not “better affordability.” It is exactly what you would expect when you ration homes where demand is intense.
UCLA Lewis Center
Minimum lot sizes increase prices by design. Fewer units per acre means higher land cost baked into every home. Newer empirical work using border discontinuities shows stricter minimum lot sizes reduce housing density and raise unit size and land values, which translates into higher prices.
NBER – “Minimum Lot Size Restrictions: Impacts on Urban Form and House Price at the Border”
The literature is not on that slide’s side. Decades of research find that tighter land-use rules raise prices in high-cost areas by restricting supply relative to demand. Glaeser and Gyourko show construction costs cannot explain prices in expensive metros once you account for regulatory barriers. Quigley and Raphael document the same in California cities. Hsieh and Moretti quantify the national cost of supply constraints in productive coastal metros. None of this squares with “constraints are relatively unimportant.”
NBER – The Impact of Zoning on Housing Affordability
“No obvious correlation between abundance and prices.” Only if you use the wrong measures. When researchers track actual supply elasticity and regulatory intensity rather than crude unit totals, the link appears. The Wharton Residential Land Use Regulation Index and Saiz’s elasticity estimates both tie tighter rules and lower elasticity to higher prices and more volatility.
See the Wharton Residential Land Use Regulation Index (WRLURI), the paper The local residential land use regulatory environment across U.S. housing markets: Evidence from a new Wharton index by Joseph Gyourkoa, Jonathan S. Hartley, and Jacob Krimmel
“Supply grew more in supply-constrained markets.” That line usually hides where growth occurred. Regions can add homes far out in exurbs while keeping job-rich neighborhoods locked into big-lot single-family zoning. The metro adds roofs, but not where people most want to live. Prices near jobs stay high because the binding constraint is inside the city, not on the fringe. That is the LA pattern the last few decades. The city preserved low-density R1 while growth jumped to inland counties. The mechanism is exactly what Hsieh and Moretti warn about.
American Economic Association – Housing Constraints and Spatial Misallocation Chang-Tai Hsieh Enrico Moretti
California’s own fiscal watchdog has been crystal clear. The Legislative Analyst’s Office calls lack of homebuilding in coastal cities the fundamental driver of the state’s high housing costs. That shortage stems from local land-use decisions that cap density and slow approvals. If single-family zoning on big lots really delivered affordability, California would be cheap. It is not.
Legislative Analyst’s Office – California’s High Housing Costs: Causes and Consequences
The first bullet confuses low demand with good policy. A small town in Alabama with large lots of course will have lower home prices, but that may be due to lower demand. The rest brush aside a mountain of evidence that restricting multifamily supply in high-demand cities raises prices. Los Angeles has one of the nation’s largest single-family zoning footprints and one of the nation’s least affordable markets. That is not a coincidence. It is the predictable outcome of rules that reserve most urban land for one household at a time.
Marty thank you so much for injecting some very reasoned responses here. I look forward to the evidence presented by those who feel differently to be as rigorous and academic as yours was.
That’s not the way RENTAL monopolization works. Marty. You have cut and pasted some valid points regarding home OWNERSHIP.
That being said you conveniently fail to factor in the vacuous void of construction of any single family housing units FOR PURCHASE versus the construction of hundreds and hundreds of thousands of collusively overpriced studio apartment RENTALS.
Marty you also failed to cut and paste anything regarding the unmitigated Wall Street Real Estate Corporations single family house hoarding especially here in California.
There are 192 publicly traded Real Estate Investment Trusts on the NYSE and an additional 24 on the NASDAQ.
For some perspective, just one REIT, Invitation Homes alone, has usurped 80,000 single family 3-4 BR Southern California homes stocked in their portfolio. Together along with speculators, and Vacation Rentals all have usurped between 32%-38% of the houses sold in the County since ’08.
REIT’s have PERMANENTLY REMOVED these homes from ever being sold to residents on the OPEN market, ever again.
Hypothetically:
If the State, the County or the City ordered every automotive dealership to close in San Diego, what would that due to the cost of buying a car? Make it more expensive, right?
IF the State, the County and the City subsidized the Hertz monopoly and enabled them to go around and pay cash for 1 car of evert 2 that came available for sale, what effect would that have on the cost of a car for the Mother of 4 that has to get to work at all 3 of her jobs? It would make her car much much much more expensive, to buy right?
So then by your own logic; if the politicos subsidized the construction required to triple the number of Hertz Rental Car offices and increased the number of rental cars by a factor of 10: That will bring the cost of buying a car down? NO, it will keep getting more and more expensive to rent a car, a car that you should have had a reasonable expectation to purchase.
Two quick things Mateo – while we want homes to be owned by people, Invitation Homes owns 80K homes across the country, not just in southern california. Per the website below, they owned roughly 7K homes in SoCal – https://sacramentoappraisalblog.com/2023/12/04/this-one-company-owns-9000-homes-in-california-interactive-map/
Also, when it comes to large corporations they’re a tiny share of actual home ownership, one 2023 survey suggested roughly 446K homes across the entire country (446K is about the same number of homes that are in San Francisco) – https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/20231102_THP_SingleFamilyRentals_Proposal.pdf
Again, homes should be owned by people but people own the most homes.
Finally you say “If the State, the County or the City ordered every automotive dealership to close in San Diego, what would that due to the cost of buying a car? Make it more expensive, right?” Now what would happen if suddenly the State, County and City ensured that there was double the amount of cars available for purchase from double the car dealerships. What would that do to the price of cars in San Diego?
Jime, it is a complete fallacy that Corporate Real Estate Investment Trusts singe family house hoarding is an innocuous threat and only represent a nominal, almost nascent problem pure plain and simple Jim.
In just the last 6 months over 27% of ALL single family home sales in the United States went to corporations and LLC’s.
https://www.abc10.com/article/news/nation-world/investors-buying-homes/507-2377952f-7535-46ca-876b-8cebe9408ad8
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/ex-labor-secretary-robert-reich-141615403.html
To state as fact, that the corporate house hoarding effect on the market is nominal, negligible and has almost no effect is a gross misstatement, wholly inaccurate, and completely disingenuous.
The point being unreasonably dismissed by you Jim is the fact that, a 80,000 3-4 BR single family home portfolio is owned by just one of the 192 publicly traded Real Estate Corporations on the NYSE, Invitation Homes and the 24 Real Estate Investment Trusts on the NASDAQ has a MAJOR effect that we see with our own eyes and your comment is egregiously misleading.
My apologies, I do sometimes type too fast and mistakenly failed to add the word “including” in my comment. That was a legitimate mistake I made in my comment, and as such stand corrected, That being said however the point is not at all lost.
The damage from just one massive corporation eliminating 80,000 homes from EVER being purchased again by Americans. Just one company can legally permanently remove housing that can never be purchased by Professors, Doctors, Nurses, Teachers, Police Officers, Fire Fighters, Plumbers, Electricians, Lawyers, or in other words “Residents.”
Single Family Homes hoarded by Real Estate Corporation manipulate the market by destroying the checks and balances historically enjoyed through housing inventory intended for purchase by residences on the market.
How many more single family homes are owned by the other 116 Wall Street Real Estate Investment Trusts?
Your question makes no sense in the context that I provided, but I am going to give you an answer based on my interpretation of what you’ve opined.
“Now what would happen if suddenly the State, County and City ensured that there was double the amount of cars available for purchase from double the car dealerships. What would that do to the price of cars in San Diego?
The State, County and City ONLY fast-track RENTAL densification. Politico’s are solely dedicated to dumping nothing onto the market but overpriced studio, and one bedroom rentals, that increase their political bribes doled out by all the pro-densification profiteers.
Answer: If the State required corporate owned high density apartments owned by out of state Real Estate Corporations to be converted from apartments to condominiums and made available for individuals to purchase it would help stabilize the market. But there is no money in that for “the Party.”
“How many more single family homes are owned by the other 116 Wall Street Real Estate Investment Trusts?” I’ve got the answer for you in what you linked above in the ABC 10 article!
“Even so, investor-owned homes account for roughly 20% of the nation’s 86 million single-family homes, the firm said.
Of those, mom-and-pop investors, or those who own between 1 and 5 homes, account for 85% of all investor-owned residential properties, while those with between 6 and 10 properties account for another 5%.
Institutional investors that own 1,000 or more homes account for only about 2.2% of all investor-owned homes, the firm said.”
So 2.2% of all the homes in America is probably what you’re looking for. Yes that would be better if it was owned by people instead of corporations but it’s also… 2.2%.
As for your response to my question I know I’m not going to change your mind about how housing, like every other piece of our economy, is tied to the rules of supply and demand but you clearly do at a fundamental level believe it, you just also believe a bunch of kind of easily disprovable stuff that blocks your ability to accept that reality. I can provide all the studies and real life examples (for instance in Austin, because of their housing boom, other rentals in the area that are not new construction are going for $1K and under) but I have a feeling you’ll never internalize it so I’ll just stop trying to make the point.
Nearly every person who comments on this app got the benefit of a wave of homebuilding in San Diego County from 1970 – 1990, when the metro area added nearly 500K houses. Their kids have not been so lucky as only 89K homes have been built from 2010 to today. Why could the people you’re talking about – teachers, nurses, construction contractors, communications people – buy coastal california property on a modest income but now their kids, who probably make more, cannot? It’s pretty obvious what the answer is.
Yes, Jim, it’s only 2.2%, but that works out to be almost 1.9 million homes.
Homeowners aren’t flooding the market with hundreds and hundreds of thousands of OVERPRICED STUDIO AND 1BR APARTMENT RENTALS. The State, County and City are Jim. Rents have tripled since 2008.
Jim, why stop at blaming locals from the 70s-90s? Homesteading practices granted land deed titles in return for settlements. So by your logic those free loading homesteader sons-a-bitches must have screwed you over too then, and put your bloomers in a twist.
Supply and demand priciples only apply to an open and “free market” not a grotesquely politico-corporate monopoly manipulated market like ours.
Funny you bring Texas into this mix… Ezra Klein much?
https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/an-abundance-of-sleaze-how-a-beltway
https://www.texastribune.org/2025/01/22/austin-texas-rents-falling/ please tell me how this article is wrong Mateo.
Austin, the city is ranked 5th among the top 10 U.S. cities with the highest number of people moving out in 2024, according to a piece from CBS.
A PODS survey confirms the CBS report. PODS is the moving company that delivers PODS to your home and then picks them up to move them.
Read More: Unveiling The Shift: Austin’s Transition From Magnet To Exodus City | https://kixs.com/people-are-quickly-leaving-austin-texas-in-droves/?utm_source=tsmclip&utm_medium=referral
The Austin market is cratering.
Marty – Thanks for your thoughtful research.
However, nothing you’ve said rebuts the core issue at hand: densification, regardless of mode, makes housing less affordable.
The iconic economists David Ricardo and Henry George well understood and documented this issue through their discussion of land rents. In modern terms, this translates to “the denser you build, the more expensive the land that it sits on gets.” We treat housing as fungible capital in neo-classical economics (i.e., build more housing and it will get cheaper), but the land component of housing is not. Land is not infinitely divisible and still useable…at some point we reach a practical limit. Hence land costs — and the attendant cost of housing — grow exponentially with density.
There are a host of studies that suggest that restrictive zoning is the problem. However, the recent analyses I cited confirm this assertion is simplistic…and inaccurate. The reality is that where Urban Growth Boundaries exist across the world land prices inside the UGBs increase at a rate disproportionately higher than that outside the UGB boundary. This causes housing prices to escalate, not diminish. You cited the Wharton Residential Land Use Regulatory Index (WRLURI) and one of the studies that use it. However, WRLURI does not factor in UGBs and the land market distortions they cause. By living within this massive constraint, the authors completely disregard the impact of the artificial shortage they cause.
I also examined the spatial misallocation argument in depth. If you dig deep enough, it supports the finding that UGBs cause high prices, not restrictive zoning. And the spatial misallocation argumentation hinges on the ability to redistribute housing, jobs, and amenities infinitely across a geospatially elastic surface — which means no UGBs — and, taken where the optimization algorithms employed suggest, winds up in a multipolar city with clusters of jobs serviced by low density sprawl housing…which is basically how San Diego formed over the last 70 years. With the imposition of UGBs and San Diego’s build out, the cost surface can no longer be optimized within their criteria.
The bottom line remains clear: you cannot create affordable housing through densification. It is axiomatically impossible.
Eric – Thank you for the response. Lots of good sources and learning. Here’s what I think to some of the points:
“densification, regardless of mode, makes housing less affordable”
Regarding Ricardo and George, I believe this may be a misunderstanding of Ricardo and George, and it contradicts both economic theory and real-world evidence. Densification—building more housing units on existing land (e.g., via apartments, townhomes, or mixed-use developments) generally increases housing affordability by boosting supply, even if land values rise in desirable areas. Rising land prices (a symptom of high demand) does have an affect with overall housing costs, but we should look at how density allows costs to be spread across more units. Let me break this down step by step.
David Ricardo (Theory of Rent, 1817): Ricardo explained “economic rent” as the surplus value from land’s productivity, especially in agriculture. Fertile land near markets commands higher rent because it’s scarce and valuable. In urban contexts, this extends to location: land in high-demand areas (e.g., city centers) generates rent due to proximity to jobs, amenities, and infrastructure. He showed how population growth and economic activity increase land values. Critically, he viewed rent as unearned (not from the owner’s effort), which could distort markets if not addressed.
Henry George (Progress and Poverty, 1879): George built on Ricardo, arguing that land values rise due to community efforts (e.g., public infrastructure, population growth), not individual improvements. He proposed a “single tax” on land values to capture this unearned increment and discourage speculation. One may argue George supports densification and efficient land use—he saw underused land in dense cities as a waste that drives up rents artificially. He wrote: “The value of land… increases with the growth of society,” but he blamed poverty on monopolistic land ownership, not density itself. In fact, George’s ideas imply that densification reduces speculative rent-seeking by making land more productive (e.g., building upward to house more people). A small single story house in downtown San Diego in Henry George’s eyes represents an inefficient use of valuable urban land that could support more housing or productive activity given the high demand and central location.
2nd: Yes, you are correct that the WLURI does not factor in Urban Growth Boundaries.
3rd: To your claim about Urban Growth Boundaries, yes they will constrain supply. While boundaries can raise raw land values near the edge, but affordability is determined by how many dwellings are allowed within the boundary. Studies find mixed land price effects and show that where UGBs are paired with generous interior upzoning, housing prices need not rise and can even fall slightly because higher allowed density offsets land scarcity. Portland and other cases illustrate this. The policy takeaway is not “avoid density,” it is “do not combine a boundary with strict caps on interior density.
There is an interesting aritcle “Impact of an urban growth boundary across the entire house price spectrum: The two-stage quantile spatial regression approach” by Shishir Mathur that housing prices inside an UGB of King County, Washington, are actually lower there than outside the boundary. The UGB there actually decreases house prices across all price ranges, from low to high. This happens because, inside the UGB, land is used more efficiently, leading to smaller lot sizes and allowing more houses to be built per unit of land, which in turn reduces the land cost portion of housing. While land prices themselves are higher inside the UGB, the efficient use of that land leads to lower overall house prices. Please be aware that this article is behind a paywall.
Frank if I write up a rebuttal to this – with similar facts and links – will you publish it as an article or would I just be wasting my time posting it in the comments to be deleted later?
Good question!
One of the things that really jumps out to me is the conclusion from the census that California has 70 of the 100 densest cities in the nation, while still having the high real estate prices that we all are familiar with.
So much for the density=higher afforability mantra.
Paul I think those numbers are incorrect. While the author of the article mentions the “70 out of the top 100”, he never provides a link and when you actually look at most dense cities in the US 35 of the top 140 are in California. Meanwhile he does provide a list of the top 15 and (outside of LA, SF and SJ) all of them are seemingly tiny farm or desert communities (and he seems to get all of the actual size of the cities wrong more often than not). Meanwhile even saying LA, SF and SJ are dense is a slight of hand when you look at the residential zoning of those places with LA at 72% SFZ, SF at 66% SFZ and SJ at a whopping 94% SFZ, there’s a reason they’re all incredibly expensive.
Here’s the link to the actual article since you can’t click on the picture. Again it’s almost all incorrect and should be treated as such – https://www.newgeography.com/content/007698-california-dominates-urban-area-density-rankings
I’d love to put all of this easily found information into an actual piece to repudiate some of the shoddy scholarship here but I’m not going to do it if it’s just going to be deleted.
Jim, where is your basis for saying the information is incorrect? I have actually seen the top 100 densest cities in other articles and found that, again, the majority of the top 100 are in California.
Have you every been to Mecca? It is the home of one of the largest, densest (and most squalid) agricultural worker communities I’ve ever seen, worse then the grape picker camps of the central valley I witnessed in the ’60’s during the grape boycott. I suspect that some of the other agricultural communities cited are similar.
I’ve actually done the math and found that OB is roughly the same residential density as Manhattan.
I think that Frank the Editor Dude would print something that had actual scholarship, even if he didn’t agree with the conclusions. “Thinking” the numbers are incorrect is not exactly conclusive. I’m not trying to start a flame war here but I’d like to see some numbers, not just opinions.
Well Jim, how many dozens and dozens of publications and sources does Eric Law’s analysis here cite and specifically point to in his piece? This is verifiable and a comprehensively researched piece? There’s a lot to unpack here.
Your link is from “newgeography.com”, provides only “I got this from the US Census for 2020, so trust me.” No bibliography, no reference materials cited, just another “this is how I see it”…
I love analysis if you got the goods I’ll read them with an open mind.
What you provided, at least through your provided link was not analysi,s it was conjecture. Not much to unpack there at all.
Mateo, first I was only responding specifically to what Paul Webb wrote, not Eric’s entire piece (which I have no interest in doing if I know it’s just going to be deleted).
As for the link I used? It’s what Eric cited above for his second citation (look for “Wendell Cox” who wrote it), I didn’t come up with it as a “gotcha!”, I actually did go through it and came to the same conclusion you did! I don’t think it’s correct and showed my work below! Will that cause you to doubt what Eric’s written and wonder what some of these citations he uses actually say since you agree it’s very flimsy?
Jim, thanks for clarifying. I strive to be as objective as possibly I can, regardless of how altruistic that may seem.
You’re thinking of SF metro, LA metro, etc. SF as a city is not all that big, and there are many other cities within that metro area, all of which are dense.
I don’t believe the demand for median to lower income housing can ever be satisified in coastal California. But we still need enough to support workforce housing, families, and elderly on fixed income. The retirees now often have their paid-off home as a nest egg and housing security. Millenials onward have lower homeownership rates and that will continue to drop, this will create a major problem in the next 20 years when they drop out of the workforce, have increased medical costs, and have to pay rent on top of that. Social security can’t cover all those costs.
I appreciate the challenge Paul so I went looking and found the where I think the issue is conflating/ obfuscating the census defined “urban areas” (which are not bound by municipal lines) versus the density of actual municipalities. For instance If you’re looking specifically at the Census’ 2020 spreadsheet per their defined “urban area” then indeed, Mecca is number one at a density of 10,979.30/sq mile. The issue is the numbers he’s using don’t count all of the land in Mecca, just what the census defines as “urban”. Mecca being the densest is based off of an area of only .63 square miles while the town itself is 6.959 sq mi, which would come out to a much smaller population density of 1,200 people per square mile (both the census and other websites peg Mecca’s population at roughly 6,900 people). By removing the municipal boundaries and only using the census’ defined “urban areas” you end up with very funky totals like San Diego having a population density of 4,550/sq mile but that’s based on an “urban area” of 674 square miles (the city is only, in total, 342 miles) with a population of over 3 million (when the city has less than 1.5 million). the population density of San Diego as defined by its borders is 4,225/square miles.
In actuality, based off of the total population divided by the actual size of land the city sits on, Guttenberg NJ is the most dense city in the country with over 62K folks sitting on .19 square miles (Guttenberg doesn’t even show up on Wendell’s list nor in the Census excel sheet because it’s lumped in with the NYC urban area). You can see the whole list here – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_by_population_density
And if you are going to say “you pulled that off of Wikipedia it’s not real” well here’s the census’ own top 10 of most densely populated places from 2024 estimates and it looks almost identical (though the numbers are slightly different thanks for population changes over the last four years) – https://www.census.gov/popclock/embed.php?component=density
Also Mecca is outside the Salton Sea in Riverside County, not in the Central Valley. Additionally there’s really no density there if you actually look at it on a map so I don’t think it’s evidence against “adding density doesn’t make things affordable” but if that’s what you were trying to suggest the only two houses (each 3 bedrooms and two baths over 1700 sq feet) with a Mecca address on Zillow are selling for $550K and $361K. There is nothing in San Diego that sells for that little for the same kind of home.
Finally while OB does have a higher population density than San Diego with 31Kish folks living on one square mile, the population density of Manhattan specifically is nearly 75K. Also if you combine the population densities of 92107 and 92106 you get 7700/square miles, an order of magnitude lower than Manhattan’s.
Jim, I know where Mecca is – I’ve been there. I did not say it was in the central valley, but that it is similar to agricultural worker communities in the central valley that were cited as high density in the census data. Farm workers are frequently residing in extremely dense living situations that border on squalid. Mecca was at one time, and maybe still is, infamous for open sewers in the residential areas.
And you’re right that I got the population density of OB v. Manhattan wrong. I meant to say New York City, which, as a whole, is about 29K per square mile, or denser than OB. Thanks for the correction.
To the OB Rag writers and editors,
please know that this is the content that brings in the majority of viewers to this site. The rag is popular because it calls out bonus ADUs, complete communities, and overbuilding. Not the liberal democrat progressive stuff, we want more articles like this, not some bogus criticism of Texas, hatred of ICE, or the random anti trump articles.
Well, there is a lot of information presented there, but also a lot of opinion and speculative conclusions, mostly skewing against YIMBYism. I think we got where we are today after decades of NIMBYism dominance, whether or not that was causal or coincidental. And maybe YIMBYism (and densification) is not the solution, but then what would be a solution? It isn’t really helpful to attack what is intended to solve the problem without suggesting another potential solution.
I commend the Rag for providing this forum, and contrary to some comments, see both sides logically presented. You won’t see this anywhere else in San Diego media. In my view, the housing crisis started in the 1970s when majority of the baby boomers entered the housing market. Homes became less about shelter and more of a financial asset. Logically that attracted Wall Street money and corporate ownership is a huge factor today. A home is not a place to live, but ROI. The question remains, what do we do about it?
Remove the investor perks. Remove tax deductions for landlords. Remove state and local tax caps for primary homeowners. Cut back on upzoning policies that drive up property values and only create rental housing. Cap vacation rentals to owner-occupied properties.
If I hear one more landlord gripe about how hard it is to keep their family (2nd) home, or how much a hassle it is to rent long-term… sell the damn thing then to someone that wants to live there, and invest your million elsewhere. The equity gains on investment homes are ridiculous and come at the expense of those who will never be able to afford one.
How about one really practical change that might help. The 1031 exchange process allows a landowner to sell a property and not pay any capital gains tax on the sale if the proceeds are re-invested in a similar property of equal or greater value. Eliminate that from the tax code and investors will no longer be able to extend the deferral of their taxable gains, allowing them to go out and buy more property with their gains. Tell me any other investment vehicle other than real estate that has this kind of treatment.
I know some will say IRAs/401ks, but while those do allow for deferral of taxes, they are ultimately taxed as ordinary income, not at the preferred capital gains tax rate that they could be taxed at if not in a tax advantaged account.
Perhaps one interesting side issue is the impact of real estate agents with far more sophisticated software available to them to affect housing rents and prices. Real estate in California, unlike most states, has been a primary source of equity generation over the lifetime of the home owners. But for many decades the appreciation rate averaged around 6 percent annually. But since around 2010 with the introduction of optimization software, prices have increased at much greater rates. Price increases near the coast immediately propagate across the City impacting all. The City and County could have done something to slow this appreciation rate, but did nothing given the revenue benefits. And until steps are taken to pour water in the real estate flames, the increases will continue.
In a vacuum, building 5 units on 1 lot will make for more affordable units than 1 or 2 on that lot. The problem is, the upzoning increases the price of all the other existing lots that are not being built. All those units increase in cost and price.
The other issue, is many of these upzoning policies only generate rental housing. These shut out new homeowners, keep them as lifelong market-rate renters, and enrich builders and investors. And often a small, older home is demolished in the process. I support policies that create more first-time ownership opportunities. So much can be done to that end without touching zoning at all.
YIMBYs are a creation of the building industry.
When then mayor Kevin Faulconer came out as a YIMBY it was pretty clear where this was coming from. Look at the YIMBY Democrat website. It’s leadership is a mix of political staffers and people who earn a paycheck through the developer/building lobby. Circulate San Diego is another feel good front group that carries water for developer and builders.
These folks are using the same methods as the tobacco and the fossil fuel industries used to create counter messaging to confuse the public about how bad their products are to people’s health.
SDG&E and other major utilities in CA have attacked roof top solar under the pretext of “equity concern”… It’s all designed to confuse, deflect and influence public opinion.
Or they’re millennials in the early 40’s and younger who want the same opportunities their parents had (at a much younger age) to buy a home and put down roots.
RK – you’re absolutely correct! We couldn’t have expressed it any better – so thanks for your clarity.
Jim, personal attacks expose the absolute weakness of your arguement.
Rather than pontificate whether the minions should be allowed single-family zoning why not ask if they (both renters and owners) prefer it? I think you know their answer as it is the “American Dream” to own a house with a yard and a white picket fence in a single-family neighborhood (not surrounded by apartment complexes aka ADUs.) Would you propose that Teslas should not exist and they should be parted out to build smaller cheaper cars because they are too expensive? Or is it best to allow a variety of options at different price points and let people strive for and choose what best suits them?
Thank you, Eric, for all of your research and useful information. It is greatly appreciated.
Building high rises on a postage stamp lot will generate more property tax revenue than a single family home by approximately 9X. Why do you think the city and state endorse it? The cost of the land and construction in a highly desirable location will keep the affordability and ownership, if available, out of reach for most. Low low income for a 400+ studio apartment is $2,500 based on the median income for the area (how SD calculates low low income ratio). Is that affordable to a family?
High density without the supporting infrastructure brings more cars, more greenhouse gas, more congestion, lack of parking, evacuation problems and decrease in existing families quality of life. That is reality.
Keep up the great work, Eric! You are greatly appreciated!
Thank you, Frank, for publishing.
It’s funny how this manifesto takes so much time and effort yet still misses the point entirely. It’s honestly impressive how NIMBY shills still don’t understand the basic concepts of supply and demand.
Shill: a person who pretends to give an impartial endorsement of something in which they themselves have an interest. Please refer to the mirror Robert.
Robert your Pollyanna usage of childish acronyms are sophomorically giving your game away as a politico-corporate real estate shill.
Don’t know why you are referring to yourself my dude. You’ll find that I have no further interest in the construction of new housing than the ability of others and myself to be able to afford housing in our fine city.
Have you really devolved into “I know you are, but what am I?”
Most if not all on this publication are in favor of “housing construction” and oppose market manipulating through construction of only over priced, high density apartment rentals. Hyper-Gentrification has forced thousands of San Diegans into the street to die; because Politico-Corporate Monopolies have spent 20 years crapping out overpriced studio and 1br apartment by the tens of thousands in Soviet Bloc style housing with burnt orange and olive green doors.
Predatory Corporate Landlords are so heavily subsidized they can offset losses resulting from the vacancies caused by maintaining artificially high rents, year after year, after year.
Meanwhile Wall Street, Air BNB, VRBO, Expedia, and speculators buy up all the 3-4 bedroom Single Family Homes, starter homes and cottages and naturally occurring affordable housing for predatory development. Eliminating our children from starter home or condo ownership.
You’re on the wrong side of history Robert and you know it.
I highly disagree, and I need not look further than this publications persistent war that it has fought against Midway Rising, NAVWAR, and the Height Limit removal, not to mention ADUs. You cannot in good faith claim on one hand to be pro-housing construction meanwhile you fight tooth and nail against every attempt to construct housing.
“Hyper-Gentrification” is a direct result of OB Rag style NIMBYism. It is the result of moral busybodies mis-using outdated regulations to prevent the construction of new housing, plain and simple. The soviet blocks that you have spent the past decade fear monger about never materialized, and all we saw were the construction of normal apartment buildings.
Large Institutional Investors only make up a small fraction of housing in our region, and for that matter even taking every Air BNB home off the market would only achieve a one time drop in the bucket to our supply crisis.
You’re attached to a backwards ideology that has forced thousands to have no choice but to live on the streets, you do not have the right to complain about someone being on the “wrong side of history”
Wow, wow, wow! Imagine that, the Rag is responsible for homeless people. Our so-called war against Midway Rising, Navwar and the removal of the height limit is responsible for the lack of housing. These claims are so ridiculous, I’ll have to leave it to others to help take them apart.
Most here are on the OB Rag are very much attached to reality, not ideology. Your comment is wholly detached from reality.
Just a couple of weeks ago Robert Reich noted that nearly 27% of all U.S. homes sold in the first quarter of this year were purchased by investors—the largest share recorded in over five years. Between 2020 and 2023, the average was 18.5%.* These numbers are much higher throughout our County.
You’ve also failed to account for LLC’s primarily registered in Delaware, that sub-contract with the 192 publicly traded Real Estate Investment Trusts on the NYSE and an additional 25-30 now on the NASDAQ.
We live here, we have eyes, know what’s going on, just so you know, the cat is outta the bag, Bud.
There are no laws, City, County nor State that require the construction of any affordable units. Density has never been about affordable housing, EVER !
The County met the State mandated housing construction requirements through 2050 in March of last year. With 4000 units coming online soon, we have about a 27 year housing surplus of vacant overpriced rental boxes.
Homeowners have not been buying up expedient project fast-tracking, securing handsome tax subsidies, to continue to flush the rental market with thousands, and thousands and thousands of Studio and 1BR rentals. We do not have that kinda pull Bud. We’re not the ones buying up all of the 3-4 BR houses Wall Street and the above mentioned politico-corporate real estate monopolists are.
Follow the money, follow the money.
Hyper-Gentrification is internationally recognized as an act of genocide.
You are truly, on the wrong side of history.
*
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/ex-labor-secretary-robert-reich-141615403.html?guccounter=1
YIMBY was formed in the San Francisco Bay Area during the height of the tech booms (I was there) in order to produce as much housing as possible for their 6-figure-salary-making workers by fighting zoning regulations. Thousands of San Francisco renters were evicted in order to make room for these workers by greedy landlords who profited greatly from these young, urban professionals, but it wasn’t enough.
YIMBY is, and always has been, an astro-turf group funded by Big Tech and Big Developers. They received so much bad press for their strong-arm (and often racist) activist tactics they pivoted to ‘affordable housing’ as their mantra to legitimize or hide their true aims. They care nothing about affordable housing–unless it’s the demeaning ‘trickle-down’ housing they tout.
This endless, ridiculous, and reductive argument re supply-and-demand fails to take into account that this ‘law’ does not apply equally everywhere. YIMBYs always love to trot out Austin, for example, of being a success story of housing production bringing down housing prices (by the way, I know long-term Austin folks who say the city is now ugly, too congested, increasingly unlivable, and they wish to leave).
But popular coastal cities like San Diego can never produce enough housing to satisfy the demand, since historically, ‘everyone wants to live here.’ NIMBYs aren’t meaning to shut people out as much as trying to retain a bit of the soul of what made San Diego so popular to begin with. Chock-a-block market-rate high rises with token affordable unit counts ain’t that.
I grew up here during a time of endless, exponential housing production, in the 60s and 70s. Never did all that added housing bring down housing prices–at all. Those costs just continued to spiral out of control because of San Diego’s permanent popularity. This new era of rabid housing production will also fail to bring relief–and we’ll be left with a much less livable and beautiful San Diego.
Why not try some new solutions instead of this unbridled development meant to benefit only a few big developers and their investors? For instance, ban private equity companies from buying up residential property? Restrict short term rentals to just those that can’t legally be occupied as full apartments–which was the original spirit of, say, Airbnb? How about restricting or banning foreign nationals from owning residential property as money laundering schemes? With these, you’d free up tens of thousands of units of housing that have been taken off the market without all the destructive overbuilding.
Ron W has started a community solution-storming session with some logical suggestions. Let’s keep it going…
1.) Immediately suspend all State, County and City tax subsidies for developers and developments
2.) Criminalize ALL off-market real estate listings in California
3.) Force the sale of all real estate property portfolios owned by foreign corporate entities
4.) Massive penalties for developers that proposed affordable housing projects to get fast-tracked approval; then never constructed them. Penalties will be retroactive going back through 2000 and kick them out of California.
5.) Require the conversion of high density apartments from rental units to condominiums on every non-California based LLC and Corporate Landlord.
6.) 25% penalties on price-fixing corporate landlords holding rental units above median prices
7.) Eliminate corporate tax write-offs for vacant rental units, this alone will force competitive pricing
8.) Scaleable property tax increases and penalties for house hoarders that can be forgiven/rescinded upon the immediate sale of the home.
9.) Require corporate landlords be headquartered in California or sell.
10.) Exponentially expand successful Section 8 Housing Voucher programs by using a portion of Developer Impact Fees
11.) Make Development Impact Fees permanent. and not “returned to the developer” if not spent in 5 years. Eliminate the idiotic $100,000 minimum threshold for access to DIF for community improvements.
12.) Penaltize all public officials failing to disclose and recuse themselves from involvement in any decisions related to ANY projects that represent even the slightest hint conflict of interest
13.) Make State the tax subsidies that have been going to developers available to first time California home buyers
14.) Prohibit Real Estate Investment Trusts from purchasing any more California single family housing units
“Might it be, that despite how it all seems, that we already have all the ingredients to solve our own problems?”
– Max Tegmark
Who knows (for today) what the cost of a studio, one-BR, or two-BR unit is to be set aside for very-low, low, and moderate income tenants, and what the numbers are for very-low, low and moderate income? It would be a chart with 9 numbers on it, and 3 numbers for income. These are the secret numbers in every news article.