Dozens of cities around the world are suffering from rejecting capitalism of property and the consequences will be the long run slow bleeding out to locations more accepting of economic reality.
Even in the most expensive places to live - Bay Area, central Tokyo, Venice, etc - if builders could build to their hearts content and see rapid high-rise housing development (first to meet the wealthy demand, and gradually to meet all other demand that turns a profit) you end up with affordable low income housing and extreme growth for the whole metro area, which means prosperity.
IE, rather than holding back development and costing yourself tremendous fiscal gains, you let those happen and tax the fuck out of them to make life better for all those displaced. Use tax money from more unfettered capitalism to improve the situation of the poor, rather than holding back markets for the sake of the poor, who are then also worse off.
> Yakuza to thank for that
Your pithy one-liner isn't very enlightening. Could you elaborate?
Let’s look at one of those deals in detail.
In 2004, Frank McCourt sold 23 acres of open
parking lots on the South Boston waterfront to
News Corp. for $145 million ... Two years later,
News Corp. sold the same land ... to Morgan
Stanley for $204 million. ... When the
BRA [Boston Redevelopment Authority] approved
the Seaport Square Master Plan, paving the way
for major development of midsize towers in 2010,
the land finally had real value. ... To limit
speculating, the BRA could have made Morgan
Stanley’s Seaport approvals non-transferrable.
But it didn’t.
Instead, over the next five years, Morgan Stanley
parceled out its 23 ... acres ... for a total
of $654 million. ...
After changing so many hands, ... housing, like
at Waterside Place, where a 598-square-foot
one-bedroom can be all yours for $2,685 per month.
When the people who are engaging in housing development are shaping policy to maximize short term profit, this is the result.
I don't have a clear understanding of how to prevent this from happening but my strong suspicion is that better government regulation needs to be in place that holds the public interest at heart.
Disclaimer: I live in the Boston area.
[1] http://www.bostonmagazine.com/property/article/2016/02/21/bo...
Democracy tends towards chaos and deadlock. There are too many cooks, and they all want different things, and they all have roughly the same amount of power. Usually nothing happens, and when something does happen it's a half-assed designed-by-committee nightmare.
When you see government acting swiftly, purposefully, effectively and succeeding at something difficult and expensive, it's because an autocratic force (like a political machine, or organized crime) has bent the democratic process to its will.
For example, only Mayor Daley could have pulled off Millenium Park in Chicago. To get something like that done in Chicago's dysfunctional government, you need to own people at every level and in every department. Only the Daleys have built empires on that scale, and other mayors in other cities don't wield nearly as much power (even if their legal entitlements are the same).