mindstalk | (Reply)

I said nothing against safety regulations.

A ban on 120 square foot apartments is not health or safety related, even if some people pretend it is. Lots of people live healthily in them elsewhere, while San Francisco invented minimum housing sizes as a racist weapon against Chinatown.

All of which is almost irrelevant when 330 square feet of parking space are required for every unit.

> what would likely amount to a Victorian penny hang with a few amenities.

I've actually *been* in a Tokyo microapartment.

> I know that a fair portion of the high cost is due to speculation and resale for profit

I don't know that. The role of outside capital seems massively overstated. Vacancy rates are very low. Housing growth has badly lagged job creation in all such cities; just today I was reading about 5000/year vs. 1000/year in Los Angeles. Houston alone has about as many housing starts as the state of California.

Housing is cheaper in much of the US, but not in the top job-creating and environmentally friendly cities. That's a costly disjunction.