Quote:
Originally Posted by bunt_q
That is really weak, come on. That's the same as saying climate change will "just work itself" as all cycles do. Review the evidence and draw conclusions - attributing patterns to "simple cycles" is intellectually lazy.
I assume also that President Obama won in 2008 merely because the pendulum was swinging. It had nothing at all to do with irresponsible wars and terrible economic policies. Or at least, that's what folks will say the next time they want to go to war. Because you can;t learn from mistakes if you refuse to accept they have any impact on fate.
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I'm not saying that action isn't needed to make the pendulum shift, I just am not sure that this is completely in the court of urban planning, and everybody has to pick their battles and focus their energy where they can best make a difference. Construction defect reform might actually really help, but that's something that has to happen at the state house and will need to be hammered out by a bunch of different interest groups. Or, the problem may also require changes in the business practices of banks all the way from local mortgage lenders straight up to the top of Wall Street (I'm still pretty well convinced that lending practices are the main reason we aren't seeing condos). These fields of expertise and the tools they could use to fix the problem are outside the realm of local land use planning.
Planners can certainly try to understand the problem and advocate for a certain solution (though it's a complicated problem, and I'm not confident that I, nor many others for that matter, fully understand its ins and outs). But short of changing profession and diving into the nitty-gritty details of the problem, they can only do so much with the tools at hand. And the toolbox of city planners is quite a bit more limited. The city can require permanently affordable units (or at least a buyout charge to build affordable units elsewhere), it can start doing things like manipulating the size of units or number of bedrooms, or potentially other unexplored avenues. But these things have been shown to barely move the needle on the larger problem of affordability. Factor in the fact that a city planning department only has control over it's own jurisdiction, and the metro housing market dwarfs the housing potential of even the largest city, and the toolbox becomes even more limited.
The city certainly can't force a developer to build a certain kind of product. It could, theoretically, just stop issuing new building permits until the lenders and developers decide they want to start building condos again. But is this really what we want? An all out moratorium on growth and development until other sectors of our society figure out how to build and sell condos again? I don't think that it is. To some extent, I feel we have to just roll with the punches and make due with the circumstances at hand - the circumstances are never perfect. It does no good to be paralyzed in the face of these problems and just throw our hands up in disgust.
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