While I agree that the housing market is significantly "planned", it's also not centrally planned. Zoning is determined by local citizens, which tend to have the opposite incentives to responsible growth, housing prices, and infrastructure costs. Also, the thing that make many housing decisions work is infrastructure, which is handled through entirely different mechanisms.
>If we let the market build enough homes to meet the demand, an apartment would be incredibly affordable.
I'm not entirely convinced that just letting builders "build more" is going to solve the issue. The reality is that companies are only going to build what they can sell and/or lease at a level that makes it profitable for them to build it. The three factors are then land value, materials, and labor costs. Materials and labor are a separate thing, so you're effectively saying that changes in zoning would decrease the land value. At this point, I'm not really sure that you'd see that impact. In many of the cities and areas where you'd want more density, the land values are already quite high, and it's unlikely that bringing in that density would decrease the land value.
What you're banking on is more housing increasing competition and bringing prices down, which would be unlikely to happen, mainly because of how long it would take to go from an empty lot to "ready-to-move-in" apartments. At best it would slow down double digit rent increases, which would obviously be a benefit, but it wouldn't suddenly make housing affordable.
From my perspective, we need to incentivize the building of affordable housing, rather than investor driven product. An investor driven product is going to try and have higher end finishes, novel floor plans, and other amenities to distinguish it from the market to maximize rents and valuations. Affordable housing can be built with normal finishes, reproducible floor plans, and comparable amenities. That's what will keep the cost down for the other two factors, material and labor, so that the end result is something that's affordable. The biggest problem is that no one in commercial real estate really likes building this kind of product, unless it's in an area without much direct competition.
>If we let the market build enough homes to meet the demand, an apartment would be incredibly affordable.
I'm not entirely convinced that just letting builders "build more" is going to solve the issue. The reality is that companies are only going to build what they can sell and/or lease at a level that makes it profitable for them to build it. The three factors are then land value, materials, and labor costs. Materials and labor are a separate thing, so you're effectively saying that changes in zoning would decrease the land value. At this point, I'm not really sure that you'd see that impact. In many of the cities and areas where you'd want more density, the land values are already quite high, and it's unlikely that bringing in that density would decrease the land value.
What you're banking on is more housing increasing competition and bringing prices down, which would be unlikely to happen, mainly because of how long it would take to go from an empty lot to "ready-to-move-in" apartments. At best it would slow down double digit rent increases, which would obviously be a benefit, but it wouldn't suddenly make housing affordable.
From my perspective, we need to incentivize the building of affordable housing, rather than investor driven product. An investor driven product is going to try and have higher end finishes, novel floor plans, and other amenities to distinguish it from the market to maximize rents and valuations. Affordable housing can be built with normal finishes, reproducible floor plans, and comparable amenities. That's what will keep the cost down for the other two factors, material and labor, so that the end result is something that's affordable. The biggest problem is that no one in commercial real estate really likes building this kind of product, unless it's in an area without much direct competition.