Following World War II, the victorious Soviet Union took stock of a housing crisis to end all housing crises in the endless fields of rubble that lay across the Russian battlefields.
Strangely, they did not immediately rezone the rubble for mixed income, and create tax incentives for private sector to build hundreds of high end housing units while towing handfuls of affordable housing along for the ride.
Stranger still (because paper is cheap) they did not print thousands and millions of vouchers promising to subsidize the rent of desperate home-hunters searching through piles of bricks for intact housing.
The Soviet Union needed to actually build enormous amounts of new housing in an incredibly short time. So they applied their national will to the job and did just that — simply built it, earning world-wide admiration for the speed with which they accomplished the task.
To be sure, their task was made easier by the central planning and execution possible in a communist-style regime. But similar housing crises, if not on quite so grand a scale, were tackled and successfully completed in western democracies following the war — on occasions when there was a national will to do so.
Flash forward nearly three quarters of a century where much of the world is facing another housing crisis, brought on, not by war, but by permitting housing to be traded as a speculative commodity.
Instead of national will to tackle the problem, however, we are offered up images of a housing industry behemoth panting and bucking at the gate, held back by tiresome laws and restrictions. The solution? Zoning tweaks and gimmicks that will open the floodgates and release a stampede. Freed from unnecessary burdens, private housing developers and contractors will quickly build us out of the crisis by delivering new housing on a scale that to date only national will — never commercial profit — has successfully tackled.
It seems reasonable we should welcome from time to time a breakthrough in regulatory thinking with at least a degree of hope. But also, with a degree of skepticism.
This past year the housing industry’s ‘flavour of the moment’ has been upzoning — allowing developers to increase housing density in neighbourhoods. For true believers in the miracle cure of upzoning, it is apparently not even necessary to specify the kind of extra housing that will be crammed into neighbourhoods. Because massive amounts of luxury housing will apparently unblock the housing pipes of the nation and allow affordability to pour forth.
So is upzoning the miracle cure? Not everyone is confident, based on actual evidence, that upzoning will even begin solve the problems of increasing affordability.
For a more skeptical view of the supposed benefits of upzoning, read more in the Salt Lake City Tribune: Commentary: High density will just make Utah housing crisis worse
