{"id":30410,"date":"2016-09-06T01:00:04","date_gmt":"2016-09-06T05:00:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=30410"},"modified":"2021-05-27T09:13:11","modified_gmt":"2021-05-27T13:13:11","slug":"qotd-minimum-lot-size-regulations-hurt-the-poor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2016\/09\/06\/qotd-minimum-lot-size-regulations-hurt-the-poor\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: Minimum lot size regulations hurt the poor"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p>Other things equal, the larger the lot, the more you\u2019ll pay for it. Regulations that specify minimum lot sizes \u2014 that say you can\u2019t build on land smaller than that minimum \u2014 increase prices. Regulations that forbid building more units on a given-size lot have the same effect: they restrict supply and make housing more expensive.<\/p>\n<p>People who already live there may only want to preserve their lifestyle. But whether they intend to or not (and many certainly do so intend) the effect of these regulations is to exclude lower-income families. Where do they go? Where they aren\u2019t excluded \u2014 usually poorer neighborhoods. But that increases the demand for housing in poorer neighborhoods, where prices will tend to be higher than they would have been.<\/p>\n<p>And it\u2019s not just middle-class families that do this. Very wealthy residents of exclusive neighborhoods and districts also have an incentive to support limits on construction in order to maintain their preferred lifestyle and to keep out the upper-middle-class <em>hoi polloi<\/em>. Again, the latter then go elsewhere, very often to lower-income neighborhoods \u2014 Williamsburg in Brooklyn is a recent example \u2014 where they buy more-affordable housing and drive up prices. Those who complain about well-off people moving into poor neighborhoods \u2014 a phenomenon known as \u201cgentrification\u201d \u2014 may very well have minimum-lot-size and maximum-density regulations to thank.<\/p>\n<p>When government has the authority to restrict building and development, established residents of all income levels will use that power to protect their wealth.<\/p>\n<p>Sandy Ikeda, <a href=\"http:\/\/fee.org\/freeman\/detail\/shut-out-how-land-use-regulations-hurt-the-poor\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">&#8220;Shut Out: How Land-Use Regulations Hurt the Poor&#8221;, <em>The Freeman<\/em><\/a>, 2015-02-05.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Other things equal, the larger the lot, the more you\u2019ll pay for it. Regulations that specify minimum lot sizes \u2014 that say you can\u2019t build on land smaller than that minimum \u2014 increase prices. Regulations that forbid building more units on a given-size lot have the same effect: they restrict supply and make housing more [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,25,84,41,13],"tags":[1420,426,91,661,907],"class_list":["post-30410","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bureaucracy","category-economics","category-government","category-quotations","category-usa","tag-classism","tag-housing","tag-poverty","tag-regulation","tag-snobbery"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-7Uu","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30410","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30410"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30410\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":65994,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30410\/revisions\/65994"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30410"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30410"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30410"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}