News Disney World Earmarks 80 Acres for Affordable Housing

[lazyboy97o]

If at all, I watch a lot of shows on YouTube on bike-able, walkable, transit centric communities and they (rightly in my opinion) always come to the conclusion we can’t build ourself out of road congestion because the more lanes we build the higher the induced demand, in many ways I think the same is true of housing, we like to think we can build our way out of high house prices but the more “affordable” houses we build the more people it encourages to move to an area, and the prices generally stay high.

Building 1,000 new affordable apartments for CMs sounds great but if those apartments end up going to transplants from (pick any state people leave for Orlando) who had previously decided against moving to Orlando due to high prices, but now decide to move because there’s “affordable” housing, then ultimately nothing changes.

Until a few years ago I dreamt of retiring in Orlando, as prices skyrocketed those plans changed, that’s likely true for thousands of people who wanted to move to Orlando, “lower” prices will encourage some of them to move again, which just maintains the housing shortage and the high prices.

Except there are places where housing costs have stabilized or even decreased despite continued growth because they were able to get construction to better match demand.

This though isn’t achieved by continuing to go out with sparse development. Allowing for density and densification is a key factor. Instead of allowing developed areas to change and grow we’ve locked them down in stasis. Fifth Avenue in Manhattan was once famous for its mansions but they’re now gone. Going back to the image of the grid you posted as an example, most likely someone couldn’t buy up a few houses and build row houses or small apartment buildings. Nor could they build stores facing the grid with apartments up above. In many places this natural process that created many cities is prohibited not just by zoning regulations but also deed restrictions.

Densification can also provide cost efficiencies that help bring down housing costs. First, replacing a couple of large houses with a quadplex has cost savings on things like providing utilities versus new construction. There’s already water and sewer lines to tap into instead of having to build them out to a new greenfield. There’s also things that can be done to make such development more affordable like increasing the number of units that can be served by a single stair. This can all also help reduce the cost of being a developer. Building four units in an existing neighborhood is a lot cheaper than having to develop a much larger site. A lower barrier to entry means more competition to help keep prices to check. In short, the big problem is that instead of having a bunch of different ways to do a bunch of different things we’ve artificially restricted ourselves to only doing a few expensive things that don’t actually work all that well.