"The data shows, clear as daylight, that prices are only ever this high in cities which refuse to build any new housing"
That graph shows only that housing is more expensive in cities that haven't built a lot (it's actually not clear, since there's no R^2, so you can't interpret it). It doesn't tell you anything about why those cities haven't built.
"In Houston, which famously has no zoning, you can buy a condo in a downtown luxury high-rise for $200 per square foot"
Houston is over 600 square miles, with few geographic impediments to construction. San Francisco is 50 square miles, surrounded on three sides by water. There's a latent variable you're ignoring.
"That's highly misleading, because if development gets easier then rents go down, and if rents go down then land prices go down."
Development doesn't "get easier" as rents go down. It gets harder, because it's harder to justify the costs of a project to investors.
The $300/sq.ft. estimate is a nationwide baseline estimates for high-rise construction. They're labor and materials costs, and are unrelated to land, rents, local policy, etc. High-rise construction becomes especially difficult as rents drop, which is why you don't see it outside of the most expensive markets in the world.
"Downtown San Francisco is full of undeveloped surface parking lots. Here are some maps I made..."
Highlighting every parking lot you see in SF (which is what you've done here) isn't a counter-argument. They're land that is being used for a current economic purpose (unlike, say, most of the land surrounding Houston, which is being used primarily for jackrabbits and snakes).
In fact, you've highlighted a number of lots in my own neighborhood that are currently in the process of being developed. Why weren't they being developed before? It wasn't worth it until residential demand in the neighborhood went up. You're assuming that these lots weren't developed "because regulation", when the answer is "because nobody wanted to build there".
"The paper at...estimates that excessive regulations are responsible for half of San Francisco's housing costs."
As far as I can tell, it's not a reliable source. It's a paper about Seattle, which runs a regression based on a small sample of land-use restrictions from a Wharton database, and claims (without proof) that regulations added $409,000 to housing costs in SF from 1989-2006. Aside from not passing the data analysis smell test, that number includes all regulations -- including state and zoning restrictions, many of which are perfectly reasonable.
The numbers I'm citing are directly from SF developers, via SPUR. It's possible that "unreasonable restrictions" drive up land prices more generally in SF, but you'd need a better analysis than this to prove it.
That graph shows only that housing is more expensive in cities that haven't built a lot (it's actually not clear, since there's no R^2, so you can't interpret it). It doesn't tell you anything about why those cities haven't built.
"In Houston, which famously has no zoning, you can buy a condo in a downtown luxury high-rise for $200 per square foot"
Houston is over 600 square miles, with few geographic impediments to construction. San Francisco is 50 square miles, surrounded on three sides by water. There's a latent variable you're ignoring.
"That's highly misleading, because if development gets easier then rents go down, and if rents go down then land prices go down."
Development doesn't "get easier" as rents go down. It gets harder, because it's harder to justify the costs of a project to investors.
The $300/sq.ft. estimate is a nationwide baseline estimates for high-rise construction. They're labor and materials costs, and are unrelated to land, rents, local policy, etc. High-rise construction becomes especially difficult as rents drop, which is why you don't see it outside of the most expensive markets in the world.
"Downtown San Francisco is full of undeveloped surface parking lots. Here are some maps I made..."
Highlighting every parking lot you see in SF (which is what you've done here) isn't a counter-argument. They're land that is being used for a current economic purpose (unlike, say, most of the land surrounding Houston, which is being used primarily for jackrabbits and snakes).
In fact, you've highlighted a number of lots in my own neighborhood that are currently in the process of being developed. Why weren't they being developed before? It wasn't worth it until residential demand in the neighborhood went up. You're assuming that these lots weren't developed "because regulation", when the answer is "because nobody wanted to build there".
"The paper at...estimates that excessive regulations are responsible for half of San Francisco's housing costs."
As far as I can tell, it's not a reliable source. It's a paper about Seattle, which runs a regression based on a small sample of land-use restrictions from a Wharton database, and claims (without proof) that regulations added $409,000 to housing costs in SF from 1989-2006. Aside from not passing the data analysis smell test, that number includes all regulations -- including state and zoning restrictions, many of which are perfectly reasonable.
The numbers I'm citing are directly from SF developers, via SPUR. It's possible that "unreasonable restrictions" drive up land prices more generally in SF, but you'd need a better analysis than this to prove it.