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I have been watching a lot about housing lately. The lack of affordability and so on. I won't bother you with details, since they are known to everyone. Almost every capital city in the developed world (and big parts of developing) is struggling with unaffordable rent, insane house price rises etc.
The process is usually something like this. Rural people move to cities, city people move to capital cities and capital cities people move to global cities. And global cities people try to live as close as possible to the city center. All the eastern europeans that I know that moved to UK didn't move to bumfuck nowhere in the Midlands. They moved to London. Ditto for a lot of other immigrants into the UK. So there is real demand to live in London. The process of concentration of people in the big metro areas doesn't seem to slow down or reverse (white flight is the only counter example).
So there is the minor problem that I have with YIMBY people - why do you think that building more will actually solve the problem with unaffordable housing? We have been adding lanes to highways since time immemorial (aka the 50s) and the congestion is still here.
But what I have been thinking is - are freedom of movement and affordable housing compatible at all? The communist regimes had something like city citizenship - you were allowed to move to the capital only with marriage/secured job in the city. Not saying it was good, but it kept the capitals a bit emptier. In the 30 years since the Berlin wall fell in my eastern european country the only people that didn't try to move to the capital are the ones that moved to London, Paris and the big German cities to make their housing situation worse.
Now people are sometimes just priced out and they move. And if the city becomes terrible people will also move. But so far it seems that if the city is safe enough, people are willing to tolerate insane economic hardships to live there. We can't cram 8 billion people in 20-30 megapolises. Could this be solved with policies alone? Should we even solve it? Is it ok to infringe on the right to move to actually strike a balance.
I think this misses a really important dynamic of how we saw housing supply grow before, and why that's stopped.
From about 1930-1980 in the western world we saw a total revolution in transportation technology. Transportation and housing are incredibly tightly linked in my view, since the point of living somewhere is to get to the locations you want to.
The advent of the reliable and affordable personal car vastly expanded the amount of land that could access major urban cores. For example in 1930 if you wanted to commute to Manhattan, you needed to live along the subway in NYC, or within walking distance of a commuter rail station. The reliable car changes that dynamic, and all of a sudden you can basically live on any parcel of land within 30 or so miles of where you work. The dynamic of the mid 20th century was overwhelmingly the conversion of farm fields into suburban homes whose occupants got to and fro by car. Coupled with the car is the creation of modern expressway designs, which allow higher speed driving and are designed to minimize bottlenecks excessive curves, and other dynamics that slow traffic.
Once expressway systems and reliable cars are built out though, we basically see a stagnation in transportation technology. Cars improve on efficiency, safety, reliability, and comfort, but they don't get you from A to B any faster. That means that the dynamic of the mid-century with tons of new land becoming usable for commuting to major cities ends. Perhaps there will be future transportation revolutions, but for now it seems we are largely in an era of transportation stagnation, at least in respect to speed, and by extension commuting range.
This is a really important thing in understanding why things changed so much from the midcentury period to now: there was genuinely more land then, because we had unlocked tons of land to go from a really low productivity use (farming) to a much higher productivity use (housing).
This also explains why for example the far flung suburbs of major cities are also seeing huge upward price pressure. It's not that there's some huge draw of dense urban living. People want to be able to commute to the big city jobs.
This is my basic argument against the "induced demand" point you're making: we did see increased supply do the job in the past. But the mechanism that was dominantly used (keep building further out suburbs) has reached a limit because we haven't seen more technological growth in transportation.
Really good point. I want to extend this one out a bit further. Many of the desirable amenities of cities can be had in small chunks. How many people living in Staten Island are really partaking of the rich cultural opportunities afforded by a world class city on the average Tuesday?
Cars and trains means there is also a second ring of people who can easily take a day or weekend trip into those big cities, condense a lot of the benefit into 6 or 36 hours, and then leave back for somewhere cheaper and less congested.
Sorry to bump an old thread; got here from the Quality Contributions roundup.
There was a discussion in the comments on this ACX post a few months back: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/why-is-the-central-valley-so-bad, or rather in the comments on the "Highlights from the comments on" followup post: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-the-3b1
The gist of the comment was that whenever you hear somebody talking about how they want to live in a city because of museums, or a symphony orchestra, or lots of rock concerts, etc., what they're really saying is "I want to live next to other smart, cultured, cool people like me". And what they hate about the suburbs isn't so much the lack of those cultural touchstones, as much as it is having to live next to people who are perfectly happy with just a house that has a yard and a garage and a grocery store and a few chain restaurants within an easy drive.
So, no, the "desirable amenities of cities" can't be had in small chunks, if the main desirable amenity you're looking for is to have neighbors you like, and if you're the kind of person who hates suburban normies.
By analogue: I (and my parents) overpaid for my college education, from a pure ROI perspective - I probably would be doing just as well in life if I went to a cheap state school instead of a fancy private college - but after the hell that was K-12 public education, I was desperate and determined to go to a college where I would be surrounded by other nerds, and willing to pay the freight. It wouldn't have been the same if I'd gone to a public university in the same city and occasionally took a bus over to the campus of the fancy private college to attend some free lectures.
So, I can be sympathetic to people who love living in cities (even if I don't understand them at all) but can't afford to. To a point. Prices are still the most efficient way we have of distributing scarce goods, and there is more demand to live in cities right now that there is available housing in those cities. If you can figure out a way to afford it, move to NYC or SFO and have fun. If you can't...well, I really want a Porsche Taycan, but I can't afford one, so....
Disclaimer: I am generally not a city fan, and probably coming at this from a place of motivated reasoning. Nevertheless.
There's some sense in this, if you're talking like Boston or SF, but cities have normies too, a fucking ton of them. Plus an enormous number of underclass people who are even less nerdy than normies. If you just want a large enough total number of like-minded people, and you're willing to search out the diamonds in the rough in a massive, alienating metroplex, I guess? I have friends who commute 40-60 minutes out from the local major city for D&D night. Traversing NYC might take just as long, and you'll spend all of it packed in a subway with normies instead of isolated in a nice, normie-proof car. If you can't find a dozen friends in a 500k county, your odds don't seem much better in a 5M city unless you're looking for something super niche; the problem is more likely with you.
I think this sort of thing is usually projection, and indicates the sort of "I think attending cultural events means I have a personality" hipster whose whining about cities is tiresome.
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I think there's something to that, but I don't think most people live in suburbs for that reason. It's why you tend to see people leaving the NYC metro area in droves when they retire: the thing that attracts people to mega cities is the job market. It's the dominant driving force, which is why commuting range is the key factor in where you see cities drive up prices, not day trip range.
You can find very, very cheap housing a couple hours outside New York City if you go up route 17 to somewhere like Middletown. Once you cross the threshold where a daily commute isn't really possible, prices don't just decline. They plummet off a cliff. Those places are definitely doable for a NYC day trip, but that does very little for the prices there.
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And the way this ultimately has to end, the only sustainable way, is for jobs to move to the second tier cities with the ability to grow massively. Waco instead of Dallas. Of course it’s also the only way no one even thinks of doing.
That's already happened to a large extent in the 1990s to present. See: the rise of the Sunbelt.
I quite disagree that it's the only way for this dynamic to end, and certainly disagree that it is a sustainable way for the dynamic to end. Certainly it would be a sad an immiserating way to see the housing market go: with Americans perpetually budget crunched and priced out of the places they want to live and forced to lands of lesser opportunity just to be able to pay the rent.
I really think lifting the prohibitions on density is a no brainer. Markets are really good at sorting out supply crunches, and the principal driver of the supply crunch is heavy handed top down regulation that bans all but one type of housing, regardless of what people actually want. Just getting the government to stop telling people how to live their lives or what kinds of housing they can live in would be a huge boon.
The question is always which people's wants should be listened to? Should the people who live in a neighborhood's desire to keep their neighborhood the way it is be privileged over the desires of others who want to live there too? Should the neighbors be able to coordinate against "defectors" who want to cash in on the desires of those others by selling their property to a developer?
Why should people who live in a neighborhood have more say over the legal structure than people who live elsewhere?
Basically this argument boils down to “people who own property should have more rights than people who don’t.” I find that unpersuasive.
Having "skin in the game" of the existing area is generally-regarded as relevant. As are what the law generally calls "reliance interests." People in the past made decisions based on conditions at the time, and generally shouldn't have the rug pulled out from under them without some notice or a chance to recoup their investments.
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I think this is the most crucial question, and as a free market guy, I'd tend to answer "no."
I also tend to think that the language you're using there is unduly negative. Why is the person who sells a "defector?" What if they just want to move to a different state, or what if they died and the house needs to be sold. Why is it "cash[ing] in" to sell a parcel of land to someone who will put it to its most valuable use?
There are mechanisms by which people agree to significant restrictions on their land in certain communities. Planned condo communities or gated HOA communities can impose very strict rules that would prohibit new densification. But I think those are very importantly different from governments doing so, given the vast difference in their compulsory powers.
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Most housing restriction in the US isn’t top down though. It’s bottom up from local communities through their zoning boards and housing associations. Top down would be things like states overriding the ability for towns to make the decisions for themselves.
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