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Knew that local housing market was about to pop after reading a city council meeting transcript from 2018
I was looking through old public records last week for a flooring bid on a downtown renovation and stumbled on this 8 page transcript from a city planning meeting. Some guy named Mark from the zoning board kept saying how their outdated density caps and parking minimums were going to strangle supply within 5 years. At the time nobody in the room seemed to care, they just moved on to talking about street light budgets. Fast forward to now and our rent has gone up 40% since 2020 and developers are fighting for every scrap of land. It was like reading a warning label nobody read. Has anyone else dug through old city records and found something that predicted the mess we're in now?
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susan815d ago
That part about the parking minimums really stuck with me. I did something similar back in 2017, just browsing through old county meeting notes online because I was bored. There was this one planner who kept saying their single-family zoning was basically a time bomb for rental prices. They had a graph showing how much land was locked up in those zones and nobody else on the board seemed to even look at it. Now my neighborhood is full of people getting priced out and the same board is scrambling to allow duplexes and ADUs. It's like watching a movie where the bad guy says "nothing bad will happen" and you're screaming at the screen.
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wells.christopher5d ago
I found a 2015 memo from some city analyst buried in their public records portal who literally spelled out how their zoning code was going to strangle affordable housing. Dude had charts showing exactly which lots could never be developed under the current rules. They filed it away and did nothing. Now those same lots are selling for double what he predicted they'd be worth. Reading those documents feels like finding a diary entry from someone who saw the future and nobody believed them.
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