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| cartoon from Bryan Caplan's forthcoming housing-economics comic book 'Build Baby Build' |
"What ideology urges us to make housing as expensive as possible?! ...
"My top explanation is sheer economic illiteracy. Much of the public flatly denies that housing deregulation would make housing more affordable. For them, supply-and-demand is the 'ideology' - and popular complaints about the downsides of new construction are 'common sense.'
"I have ... evidence that economic illiteracy is the foundation of draconian housing regulation.... When Clayton Nall, Chris Elmendorf, and Stan Oklondzija test[ed] for economic illiteracy in other markets, they detect[ed] it. But the economic illiteracy is especially egregious for housing...
"[I]t’s good news ... If the problem is economic illiteracy, however, at least we don’t have to change human nature to dramatically change policy. Perhaps we can just repeatedly hit the public over the head with a friendly sledgehammer of economic education.
"A friendly sledgehammer like… a non-fiction graphic novel on housing regulation."~ Bryan Caplan, from his post 'NIMBY is economic illiteracy'
4 comments:
Isn't the issue silly Planner rules vs common law protections?
If you look at many objections to 3 storey almost on a boundary, there is often a breach of the right to light on the adjoining property - which in my experience is the main driver with objections to the MDRS.
losing sunlight is a major issue for many homeowners and directly affects their amenity/enjoyment. And has an immediate impact on their property value.
Obviously no right to privacy, but that I suspect is next in concerns.
A simple way to process shading breaches would ensure people can build what they want, but have no impact on adjoining - or they do a deal via covenant to compensate the adjoining property.
In reality would not impact all sites, depending on sun orientation.
@ Anonymous - Ensuring buildings have "no impact" would be impossible in most urban contexts. The existing rules around shading still allow some impact, but are permitted provided the building remains within a defined recession plane that varies according to it's orientation to predominant sun.
Getting rid of all rules and going back to common law would be superior in terms of the ideal solution, but that's a massive step from our current context, and unlikely to happen in our lifetime. A good first step would be to just get rid of all the BS rules, and retain the non-BS rules (relating to sunlight, etc).
@MarkT - but doesn't MDRS worsen recession plane - closer to boundary/higher height/angle which makes it far worse than current rules? - noting some boundary rule changes already made AUP worse.
While rules try and protect sun access, they are being consistently worsened, and changing rule son owners after purchase. If you buy a building in a commercial town centre you know an adjoining site can be built right on the boundary - so obviously you don't put windows on your side there. But here people have designed renovations/outdoor areas based on previous existing rules, and now get attacked as Nimby's / boomers etc.
I haven't seen any analysis of what could be built (in-fill) with old recession planes.
Also interesting that the 3 storey townhouse trend is to allow an internal garage - going against the planners dream of no cars as well! vs the previous 2 storey in the 80's, which was adequate - and created less shading/direct impacts.
@ Anonymous - Ok, I may have misunderstood your comments. If you're suggesting we could have common law protection on the basis of "no additional impact" (compared to what the non-BS component of the previous rules allowed), I agree that would work and it's a tidy and clean solution. To get to that point though you'd still have to do what I was saying as first step - weed out the non-BS rules. Otherwise there's also sorts of nefarious ways you could claim an "impact".
Planners would never agree to it either, because they have an ego-investment in believing their intervention is necessary and they can't leave people free to sort it out themselves. This is why it's crucial that the bureaucracy be accountable to politicians, which is unfortunately becoming an increasing rarity. At least we can vote politicians out, and there's a chance of getting someone in who wants and has the fortitude to clean house. Bureaucrats though are increasingly accountable to nobody except the growing culture of wokeness, and those turkeys ain't ever going to vote for Christmas.
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