What is the solution to the housing crisis?

[AGA]

How should the nation's cities ensure easy access to affordable housing?

[Damocles]

Zoning laws should be abolished

[gerritcole]

We build underground

[Cassandra]

The abolition of private property and the redistribution of housing stock based on need.

lol

[Del Tachi]

There is no housing crisis.

[Hope For A New Era]

This is where I go oddly libertarian for a moment. Zoning's time has (mostly) come and gone.

There is no housing crisis.

Says the person from the state with the cheapest housing in the country.

[Del Tachi]

There is no housing crisis.

Says the person from the state with the cheapest housing in the country.

That we have great variability in the price of housing/rents based on their perceived desirability is proof that the market is (mostly) working as intended. 

There are some local challenges in places like San Francisco, but overreaching federal intervention in those markets is only going to make things worse. 

[Donerail]

This is where I go oddly libertarian for a moment. Zoning's time has (mostly) come and gone.

There are issues with how much land is zoned exclusively for single-family residential, but the knee-jerk response of "abolish zoning" isn't the answer. There are good reasons not to allow chemical factories to open next to elementary schools. There are also ways to mimic zoning that contribute far more to the problem — in Houston, for instance, there is no formal zoning, but 1. neighborhoods can enact private covenants that function as zoning, 2. the city requires minimum lot sizes, and 3. there are substantial parking minimums, all of which serve to create a built environment with lots and lots of neighborhoods that are exclusively SFR. Houses are cheap there b/c of growth at the suburban peripheral, but the zoning-free experiment doesn't guarantee the kind of infill development we need in other cities.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Why do people always assume that there is only one housing crisis?

[Ferguson97]

End single-family zoning and build more apartments/mutli-family housing.

[All Along The Watchtower]

In the US, at least, a few ideas:

Stop credential inflation for jobs that don't require college degrees, and have public and private investment at all levels for rural communities, small towns, and small cities/metros around the country.

No one should feel compelled to move out of their hometown just because "the good jobs" are in a handful of overhyped and oversaturated metros, which are mostly on the coasts.

[John Dule]

It was caused by the government. The solution is the market.