#unless they're urbanist wonks

[wandaluvstacos]

all of these mentioned above are not regulations on housing. They are product regulations. Which are good! But they have very little to do with housing; no one is installing lead pipes in a house because lead pipes are not made. Because of regulations on products. Same with asbestos shingles.

Trump deserves to be [redacted], and I'm sure whatever regulations he cut are probably good ones because the GOP is a death cult who loves the suffering of others, but housing regulations in the US are notoriously awful and they're why we're in this housing crisis mess to begin with. This idea that "oh well landlords are just evil" does not take into account that... landlords are evil everywhere. Human greed exists in every country in the world. And yet some places (mostly in Asia) do not have a housing crisis.

There are some good housing regulations, for sure. A home should be habitable, with proper wiring and plumbing and all that. But that's not the problem, because we all know how to BUILD a house. There are millions of people who can figure that out. It is the regulations that stand in the way of building homes that are actually the issue. Trump and the GOP do not care about those, because they like those. Zoning was created as a way of segregating neighborhoods after the Fair Housing Act made it illegal to discriminate against race. Zoning regulations, parking mandates, the way the US requires every apartment building to have two staircases and giant elevators... these are all things that make building housing extraordinarily expensive, impractical, and unpleasant. Parking mandate regulations is why you literally cannot build charming downtowns anymore. Building an insane amount of parking - especially via underground garages for apartment buildings-- add thousands of dollars of cost to each unit in an apartment building. And parking mandate numbers were just... made up. No reason. Local officials literally just guess how much parking they THINK is needed.

I don't expect random people on Tumblr to understand the intricacies of urban design and the battles raged on that front, but not ALL regulations are good across the board. Many of them were invented to fuck over Black people, or keep poor people out of a neighborhood, or were thought up in response to one problem a guy had 50 years ago. This NIMBY idea of "oh well the only reason we can't find housing is because it's EMPTY and being HOARDED by greedy landlords" is just... not true. Landlords suck ass, but they exist everywhere. They exist in West Virginia, where housing is cheap, and they exist in California, where housing is not. It's really important to look into WHY housing is more expensive in some places more than others, and A LOT of it has to do with those local regulations. Lead and asbestos and the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory simply have nothing to do with it.

Homes are expensive because of landlords hoarding them for profit, not because of regulations.