Your beef isn’t with landlords, it’s with the single-family homeowners in your area who use every available legal and extralegal angle to block any new construction, because “it would change the neighborhood character”. They fuck you over and get to absolve themselves of blame and guilt by talking about evil developers and landlords as a smokescreen to keep you from seeing that they are the problem.
As much as I'd like to agree, nationwide the prices of housing has skyrocketed. In the last 5 years, there's been a 50% increase in home prices where now $450,000 is the median home price.
Can it be that the issue you're describing explains what's happening in every single state? Has development stalled all across the USA (and abroad) simply due to regulation?
It’s not just zoning restrictions that caused housing prices to increase.
1. There was a lot of money circulating during the COVID pandemic as a result of very low interest rates and other practices intended to stimulate the economy. More money chasing a limited supply of assets means that those assets cost more.
2. WFH during COVID made many areas of the country more desirable since those with remote jobs were not limited to the locations of their employers. I’ve seen exurban areas in California face skyrocketing home prices in 2020-2021 due to WFH demand; Los Baños is a prime example.
3. There may have been increased demand in second- and third-tier cities from those who have been priced out of first- and second-tier cities. For example, Sacramento (my hometown) always gets a large number of former Bay Area residents whenever housing prices in the latter place spike.
>Can it be that the issue you're describing explains what's happening in every single state? Has development stalled all across the USA (and abroad) simply due to regulation?
I mean this is pretty trivially true, excepting some markets like Japan. 100-200 thousand dollars of wood and drywall and concrete sells for 0.5 to 2 million in much of the country. People (builders) haven't started hating money, they just aren't allowed to build.
Heck if it were legal I'd personally find some investors, buy up a few 1 million dollar sfh's and replace them with 8 500k condos each.
