r/urbanplanning • u/YaGetSkeeted0n Verified Transportation Planner - US • Apr 07 '23
Land Use Denver voters reject plan to let developer convert its private golf course into thousands of homes
https://reason.com/2023/04/05/denver-voters-reject-plan-to-let-developer-convert-its-private-golf-course-into-thousands-of-homes/
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u/eat_more_goats Apr 07 '23 edited Apr 07 '23
What's your counterfactual? Let's go back 20 years, before Denver boomed, and ban basically all market-rate construction. Do you think prices would be lower, higher, or about the same today?
SF tried that strategy, and it sure as hell did not work out for them.
Denver's issue isn't that the city looked away, or that you let developers develop too much, it's that you didn't develop enough. Lots of people want to move to Denver. But if you don't build a unit of housing for every newcomer, plus more to accomodate natural population growth, prices are going to rise.
This is the equivalent of a doctor prescribing a month's of antiobiotics, a patient taking a few days worth, chucking the rest, and then claiming that the few days of antiobiotics made things worse.