Fuck your "family-sized flat" requirements

People yearn for bachelor pads, but are everywhere in flats.

I live, like most young professionals, in a flat with two other dudes roughly my age and social status who would all quite like to live on our own. I've known one for 15 years and the other for a fortnight (thankfully, he seems nice even if he despises cycleways). It is the nicest flat I've lived in, in the best location, and its even warm inside. I'd rather live alone, or with my girlfriend.

The primary shortage of housing is for 1 and 2 bedroom units, primarily in cities and inner suburbs. This is generally true across Anglosphere cities with housing shortages. Household sizes are smaller than the era when houses actually got built. But it is common for people to having flatmates for years. I've flatted for 9 years, in 7 flats, it was good when I was 19 and living with my friends from my hall and less so in my late 20s. And despite the indignity of living with others, fighting for enough fucking fridge space to have multiple cheeses a 28 year old on a 6 digit salary, people keep on saying that new housing developments should be required to offer family sized flats.

I don't trust property developers on many points, but I do trust them to try make money. If they see a way to make money selling 1 or 2 bedroom flats, they will. If they see a way to make money selling 3 bedroom flats, they will.

In Christchurch right now, flats with 2 bedrooms are very cheap and with 3 bedrooms are very expensive. Or is it the other way around? In any event, I trust its cohort of townhouse builders  to adjust and build slightly bigger/smaller units for the next 18 months to chase those dollars.

A lot of housing views come down to a basic divide in what property rights and regulations are for: do they emphasize the right way of living? Or do they serve liberal ideological and economic ends? That is, do property rights let you do what you want? My view, as a liberal and a free-marketeer, is that we should let people build housing and use it as they want.

Not everyone is liberal. Then, sure, demand that 17% of units in new developments have 3 or 4 units and get the renters - who want privacy, or dignity, or just a place to blare Kendrick or The Rest is Politics or /r/gonewildaudio - go fuck themselves in whatever you deign to allow. See how easy you make politics and how garbage you make policy when you go full Everything Bagel rather than just relentlessly pushing for housing policy to deliver massive amounts of well-located, tolerably good housing. Treat the people who have the money to pay the rent to make new developments pencil as undeserving.

Singletons, bachelors, young professionals, people dating but its early stages or complicated or non-committal; they all need housing and they don't really want shared housing. Just about everyone flatting in a shared flat would, quietly or eventually, prefer their own space. We need a truly massive number of 1 - 2 bedroom units in New Zealand. Maybe a million at this rate.

Just build housing. Quite a lot of it. In nice places, by other houses and stores and bus stops and bars. Tall. In boring boxes. And let people make money off building housing, because the alternative is people making money from not building housing. And that sucks, and if housing sucks then peoples' lives suck.

We need to stop making demands that new housing deliver other social goals . Urban regeneration is nice but does that justify the Tamaki Regeneration Company building a thousand houses in a decade (wait that sounds good?) when it was meant to do 400 a year (uh what?) at vast expense (hmmm)? Does it justify the dumb 'affordability' and 'social housing' requirements that hurt the viability of new housing in the US, the UK and Australia? Does it justify the dumb demands to build less lucrative family-sized flats in developments, when the demand is for bachelor pads? No, we'd be better off trying to flood the market with new housing so firms had to get into the niches.

Build housing. A lot of it. In nice places.