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In my state, or in my capital city, you say this, but the real estate developers are generally the top 1% in town. If they're running on razor-thin margins, I'm not seeing it - I am seeing them on my Facebook (being friends with the wife of the mayor) doing things like taking their kids on vacation to the French Riviera, Switzerland, Tokyo, the Maldives... well, alongside the City's Planning Committee commisioners and their families...
Highly restrictive development rules, often sold as ways to stick it to those very rich developers, are precisely what make them so rich. Only those with huge amounts of capital to spend can make it through the gauntlet of the rules and have big enough asset portfolios to stay in the game. They can bank land for decades, speculating on the best time to take their profits, all while others live through shortages of housing and do not have access to that land.

Those very processes that make it hard to develop keep out the scrappy up-start competition, the contractors that could be building houses all over if they had enough lawyers/planners/specialists to help them get through the system.

Look, for example, at LA, which has super super restrictive rules on what can be developed where, and has huge amounts of discretion at the political level, so that NIMBYs can block what they want. The only people who can build housing are developers who bribe the politicians (there was a somewhat recent arrest in LA on this, involving literal bags of cash, by the FBI).

Having simple, straightforward rules that are completely objective is the only way to try to flatten out the playing field. However such rules get shot down by NIMBYs precisely because they don't want the shady developers profiting off apartments! It's all highly ironic.

Well you see, we clearly need to armor the parts of the planes that have bullet holes in them upon return!
I get what you mean, but I doubt corruption is good for building good housing
Corruption isn't prevented by regulations; its enabled by regulations. That's the flaw in your thinking. If a market's only players are really rich, there are 2 possible reasons for that: 1) the market is really good and more players should be entering or 2) the market is highly regulated which prevents more players. Guess which happens a lot more than the other in RE development?

PS Most of the people who build houses aren't very rich, just the CEO/big boss who owns the entire company is. The other 99.9% of people are middle class/blue collar.

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