Quote:
Originally Posted by pdxtex
developers build what people want. you've got it the other way around. its not as if they are pulling as fast one on anybody. their product is a result of a desire to have it. from a policy standpoint, lots of cities favor single family zoning, yet their populations continue to grow and competition for the housing stock gets worse and worse. its that missing middle that im envious of. medium density, urban-ish housing. we have some, but its still hard to develop here. Portland zoning code, pre ww2 was far more urban minded than our existing code, 2017...its like that everywhere. laissez faire policy makes for a better city. or at least it did. this country was way more urban 100 years ago in than it is now.
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The central idea of urban planning is that cities need to be regulated, there is market failure, and laypersons don't always know what's best for a city. I think it's a bit more nuanced than that, and there is a lot of merit to the stakeholder process. That being said, I highly doubt over half of Greater Toronto's new housing would be multifamily, if it weren't for the regulations created by Ontario's Greenbelts.
In a city like Portland, although it may be political suicide from the way you put it, the city could simply rezone lots to higher density so that when new infill is created, it must be denser or it won't get approved. Lack of zoning may have worked in the pre-automobile age, but because of the systematic nudging of governments and companies towards suburbs and automobiles, people have become reliant on it in North America to the point where non-zoned cities like Houston are extremely sprawling and car dependent. Portland's transit may be overhyped, but it seems far worse in Houston. The only way I see Houston changing is through massive incentivization and regulation of density, transit, and just planning in general. It's hard to undo all that has been done, and it can't be done passively with a lack of zoning, when there is a path dependence created towards car dependence.
With that said, I do believe that cities in general are over-regulated and over-zoned, such that they become museum cities or overpriced if they already have urban bones, or continue to sprawl to neverland elsewhere. Like planning in general, I believe there is nuance and somewhere in the middle is best.
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