I said "Raleigh doubled its zoned density overnight." You said "No they did not" and "No city has implemented anything like zoning reform." Both of these are false.
You can refer to the text changes. They doubled the zoned density in nearly every residential zoning type in the city. It is a huge change, though I suppose you can claim that's not "reform" if you want. It is sufficiently reformative for my purposes of increasing urban density over time.
Changes will take time to kick in, and obviously they should take time to kick in because simply clicking a button and doubling actual built density would crater the economy. It makes no sense. The zoning change removes an artificial restriction on the natural supply/demand curve, so now supply can grow as-needed in the forms desired.
I don't think it really does to the supply/demand curve what you think it does.
In general, when new construction occurs, it's taking low density and replacing it with more like 10X density. A very tiny amount of land gets developed at once, so you need each new development opportunity to generate as much supply as possible.
What this did was make people think gosh, that means a lot of housing! But in actuality, very few of these ever get built. Only very old housing stock ever makes sense to replace with only a doubling.
I appreciate what you're trying to say, but what I said was actually true. This won't have much impact. I can give you drips and drabs of information this way to help you understand how development works, but I can't give you an entire primer, unless you'd like to get on the Zoom and talk about it for a couple hours.
Maybe true in an area that requires redevelopment to grow, but in Raleigh there are huge, huge swaths of totally undeveloped land that are now much more valuable even within the same zones. You do not need ultra-high density towers to create true urban density.
I think you're setting up a false premise there about towers? Not sure where that came from.
Can you show me land that is now much more valuable than before? I suspect the places you're thinking of aren't really changing on value or buildability the way you expect.
> In general, when new construction occurs, it's taking low density and replacing it with more like 10X density. A very tiny amount of land gets developed at once, so you need each new development opportunity to generate as much supply as possible.
Naively, you're talking about converting a one story building into a ten story building. That == a tower.
You're skeptical that higher density zoning increases land values?
> Now, let's talk about the multi-family sector. If you thought single-family homes were hot, wait till you hear about this. Land suitable for apartment development in downtown Raleigh and Durham has seen price increases of 50-100% in the last five years alone.
> And it's not just apartments. The demand for townhomes and condos has sent land values for these types of projects through the roof, with increases of 30-40% in prime locations.
Of course we can quibble about what amount of that appreciation is caused by zoning changes, but from first principles it is obviously the case that given the same exact plot of land, the expected value of developing 10 houses on it is much higher than the expected value of developing 1 house on it, ergo a lot that allows 10 will have a higher price than that same exact lot constrained to 1 home.
