Housing isn’t just about land upon which the home is placed…..traffic infrastructure, schools, water, power, law and order, fire stations, post offices, sustainability, waste management, sewer etc is necessary.<p>We saw how devastating this was during the paradise fires and Napa tubbs fires earlier. Some areas are not meant to be habitable because it’s simply not feasible.<p>There is a reason the tropics are over populated vs the rest of the world. Heating and cooling costs are ridiculously high and not sustainable. We need timber, fossil fuel powdered grids and snaking supply chains..all of them rely on fossil fuels.<p>The restrictions help us live well. Perhaps it time to build smart and not because we need to get what we demand … and we usually demand what we don’t have..and can’t have.<p>In other words, ‘desirable areas’ are desirable because there is a high operating cost to it. Putting cheap homes where gas is 6 bucks a gallon and pretty much everything else is expensive is setting people up for penury because they simply can’t afford to live there even if they move there. Harsh truth.<p>A lot of the costs of city infrastructure is borne by developers and passed on to the home owner in the price.<p>The city relies on high home cost to fund the city expenses via property taxes.<p>Low income and affordable homes are also subsidized by high developer built market rate homes.<p>Mortgages require homes to last at least 30-50 years. You can’t get that with manufactured homes whose main advantage is the low cost.<p>The solution to housing everyone is not building homes first. It’s building infrastructure first and then build around the carrying capacity of that infrastructure. This is how high density cities around the world are designed.<p>You can’t guesstimate what it takes to run a city after you fill it up. It’s working backwards. First determine all of the infrastructure load, pressures and costs..and then populate the city. This is exactly the reason zoning and building restrictions exist. As they should.<p>Unliveable, unloveable and unaffordable cities are a direct result of forgetting the above rules. I don’t know when it happened, but clearly someone thought that cities can be raised out of nothing. Reality? It’s more nuanced and multi layered.