<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>QIYGT</author><text>&amp;gt;  There seems to be a general lack of political will for big projects in the west.&lt;p&gt;We don&amp;#x27;t need big projects. If popular US cities like Seattle and San Francisco simply allowed people to build 5-story apartment buildings in all the space that&amp;#x27;s currently set aside for single-family detached homes, you&amp;#x27;d see people building millions of small projects to easily meet the demand.</text><parent_chain><item><author>Negitivefrags</author><text>There seems to be a general lack of political will for big projects in the west.&lt;p&gt;Looking at Asia now is like what the west used to be like.&lt;p&gt;I am unsure about the cause but I suspect that a lot of it is that people seem a lot more worried about consultation with locals and such.&lt;p&gt;In the past the government might just decide “we are building a highway here” or “we are building all this infrastructure for houses there” and there seemed to be a lot less consideration for how people affected would feel about it.&lt;p&gt;Media has gotten more pervasive, so we might imagine that politicians are more concerned about things flaring up there, but Asia has plenty of media access too, so that doesn’t really explain it.</text></item><item><author>plantain</author><text>I really don&amp;#x27;t understand why governments around the globe just throw their hands in the air and pretend housing is an unsolvable problem for which they have no obligation to fix.&lt;p&gt;It wasn&amp;#x27;t always like this - in 1922 in Australia we realised there was a shortage of 25,000 homes, so they just made it happen [1]. Why are we so impotent today? Do we just not care enough? Are the vested interests too powerful?&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;pbs.twimg.com&amp;#x2F;media&amp;#x2F;FlSIML5aYAAVmvf?format=jpg&amp;amp;name=large&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;pbs.twimg.com&amp;#x2F;media&amp;#x2F;FlSIML5aYAAVmvf?format=jpg&amp;amp;name=...&lt;/a&gt;
&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;nla.gov.au&amp;#x2F;nla.obj-2947838631&amp;#x2F;view?sectionId=nla.obj-2959070613&amp;amp;searchTerm=%22high+rent%22&amp;amp;partId=nla.obj-2947971754#&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;nla.gov.au&amp;#x2F;nla.obj-2947838631&amp;#x2F;view?sectionId=nla.obj...&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>Canada bans most foreigners from buying homes</title><url>https://www.voanews.com/a/canada-bans-most-foreigners-from-buying-homes/6899982.html</url></story>
<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>dionidium</author><text>&amp;gt; &lt;i&gt;There seems to be a general lack of political will for big projects in the west.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;The spectacular thing about the housing crisis is that you don&amp;#x27;t even &lt;i&gt;need&lt;/i&gt; any big government projects. It just needs to be &lt;i&gt;legal&lt;/i&gt; for private actors to build housing. On most plots of land today it is not legal to build anything but a single-family home, so cities are no longer able to naturally densify over time (just like every single modern city did 100 years ago, so that they could become the cities they are today).</text><parent_chain><item><author>Negitivefrags</author><text>There seems to be a general lack of political will for big projects in the west.&lt;p&gt;Looking at Asia now is like what the west used to be like.&lt;p&gt;I am unsure about the cause but I suspect that a lot of it is that people seem a lot more worried about consultation with locals and such.&lt;p&gt;In the past the government might just decide “we are building a highway here” or “we are building all this infrastructure for houses there” and there seemed to be a lot less consideration for how people affected would feel about it.&lt;p&gt;Media has gotten more pervasive, so we might imagine that politicians are more concerned about things flaring up there, but Asia has plenty of media access too, so that doesn’t really explain it.</text></item><item><author>plantain</author><text>I really don&amp;#x27;t understand why governments around the globe just throw their hands in the air and pretend housing is an unsolvable problem for which they have no obligation to fix.&lt;p&gt;It wasn&amp;#x27;t always like this - in 1922 in Australia we realised there was a shortage of 25,000 homes, so they just made it happen [1]. Why are we so impotent today? Do we just not care enough? Are the vested interests too powerful?&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;pbs.twimg.com&amp;#x2F;media&amp;#x2F;FlSIML5aYAAVmvf?format=jpg&amp;amp;name=large&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;pbs.twimg.com&amp;#x2F;media&amp;#x2F;FlSIML5aYAAVmvf?format=jpg&amp;amp;name=...&lt;/a&gt;
&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;nla.gov.au&amp;#x2F;nla.obj-2947838631&amp;#x2F;view?sectionId=nla.obj-2959070613&amp;amp;searchTerm=%22high+rent%22&amp;amp;partId=nla.obj-2947971754#&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;nla.gov.au&amp;#x2F;nla.obj-2947838631&amp;#x2F;view?sectionId=nla.obj...&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>Canada bans most foreigners from buying homes</title><url>https://www.voanews.com/a/canada-bans-most-foreigners-from-buying-homes/6899982.html</url></story>