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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31197 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 9, 2023

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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.

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 congestion isn't as bad as it would have been if we didn't add any lanes or build any new roads since the 1950s. Having to build more to stay in place doesn't imply that building more is a bad idea.

Similarly with housing, liberalizing housing rules, and so increasing building is extremely unlikely to result in cheap housing for everyone. But if it reduces prices a bit, or even just slows the increase in prices, its still useful.

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.

If instead of adding lanes, you employ technology designed to transport large numbers of people through dense areas (mass transit systems), you can indeed defeat congestion. Likewise with housing. Technology exists for high-density housing, and if you implement it then more people can live according to their preferences, and less taxes, less pollution, less economic inefficiencies must be endured in the name of car-dependent, utility-subsidized suburbs.

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.

Those conditions didn't apply if you just rented, though.

Almost everyone rented, since you couldn't really own an apartment back then. Well, housing coops were a thing, but you couldn't just say "I have a stack of money, let me join a coop in Minsk".

In my corner of communist paradise home ownership was above 90%

now give also statistics about how much space there was per person and how long you needed to wait for a home or flat

We have been adding lanes to highways since time immemorial (aka the 50s) and the congestion is still here.

In any other economic sector the reaction to "we build more and more demand appears!" would be "that's absolutely amazing, I love it, build even more."

Isn't "more dakka" literally the topic of one of the Sequences?

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.

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.

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.

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.

and if you're the kind of person who hates suburban normies.

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.

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.

regardless of what people actually want.

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.

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.

Induced demand

Is an ideologically loaded term. It makes no sense from an econonic point of view, its just demand. Unrealized demand is still demand. The price of roads are held constant so increasing supply will increase usage. But obviously there isnt infinite demand! A steady state will be reached.

It also just happens to be that the majority of the people who use that term are vehemently for getting rid of cars altogether for ideological reasons.

Moreover, only using America for sensemaking makes for a a shoddy model for all the systems around The World. America is stupid in unique ways, especially when it comes to Urban planning.

American highways clog up not because there are too many cars. Technically because there are too many cars for how poorly they are designed but, design them better then!

There are more than enough cities in Europe and Asia with vastly more density and no traffic. See Japan, Germany, Nertherlands, Korea...

And dont get me started on Americas single family housing nonsense.

Building more

Yes I do think building more will solve the price problem. Its quite literally the most fundamental theory of Economics. Supplies in many of these cities are artificially constrained.

Also why not just make more Global cities? Or cities of all kinds? Its not a law of the universe that the cool kids must only live in London and NYC. Its not like those places existed forever.

Yes for some people they need to live in THE city, they would rather live in NYC with rats and bed bugs just to be one of the cool kids. Thats fine. We just neednt structure society and policy or plans for the future around those people.

I live in Dubai, a relatively newly built city. Its one of the most global cities in The World. It supercedes all cities in America barring NYC in terms of amenities. Housing here is cheap, wayyyy cheaper than you would imagine. Reason? No nimby shit. Housing gets built in abundance. Its cheaper to live in the tallest building in the world in pure luxury, than certain 2 bedroom apartments in Manhattan or London. And no housing is not subsidized with oil money, its a relatively free market.

American highways clog up not because there are too many cars. Technically because there are too many cars for how poorly they are designed but, design them better then!

Is this because of highway design? Or because we give a license to anyone who can breathe, in stark contrast to Japan, Germany.....

In America, a car is seen as a defacto right. A huge portion of cars and people driving them shouldn't be on a road. Like anything else when it comes to freedom, things weirdly just kind of work out and aren't as bad as they should be. But the consequences of it are consistently bad traffic and additional crashes.

Almost every capital city in the developed world (and big parts of developing) is struggling with unaffordable rent, insane house price rises etc.

Tokyo isn't. Guess why.

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?

Simple arithmetic. The problem is a lot of people want to live in or near central london or wherever, but there are too few houses for them. If we double the number of homes and they aren't vacant, twice as many people have satisfied their desire to live in or near central london.

If prices are still high, we probably just didn't add enough homes.

We have been adding lanes to highways since time immemorial (aka the 50s) and the congestion is still here.

A congested 10 lane highway is helping twice as many people reach their destination as a congested 5 lane highway. So it sounds like the main problem is that we didn't add enough lanes.

There are plenty of empty highways, which indicates that one can build highways that meet and exceed the demand.

Should we even solve it? Is it ok to infringe on the right to move to actually strike a balance.

That probably is what california NIMBYs would like.

Tokyo isn't. Guess why.

Non existent birth rates, low immigration, massive construction and tiny apartments.

No.

https://www.themotte.org/post/304/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/52358?context=8#context

The first two points don't really matter because of massive internal migration.

The last point doesn't really matter either, the average apartment in Tokyo isn't that small by international standards.

It's America that is the outlier with its huge homes.

The most special thing about Tokyo is that people don't live in human anthills like they do in places like Hong Kong.

People have actually been leaving Tokyo recently. And Tokyo apartments really are outrageously small, I worked with middle class people who had a wife, two kids, and a 45 minute commute and still lived in a 65m² "two bedroom" apartment (2LDK). Not to mention they're constructed with low quality materials (the crappy insulation is especially egregious). To be clear, this is in a suburban area far outside of the Tokyo core (western Suginami-ku). None of that is really tolerated in other first world countries.

The problem is a lot of people want to live in or near central london or wherever, but there are too few houses for them.

Let's say that supply increases significantly, but a lot of people want to live in or near central london at prices slightly below the current price. So price decreases a small amount, a lot of new homes are purchased at that small price, but not much else changes. The basic supply and demand theory is that some number of 'people want to live in london' at specific price points - but if the price elasticity of demand is very high, price might not decrease much. This is the 'induced demand' problem with roads - add a lot more lanes, a lot of people who weren't willing to drive at current congestion are now willing to drive at slightly less congestion, so congestion barely decreases.

A congested 10 lane highway is helping twice as many people reach their destination as a congested 5 lane highway. So it sounds like the main problem is that we didn't add enough lanes.

At least for lanes, one does run out of room eventually.

I have no idea how this applies to cities, and if cities are as useful as people bid their prices up to be, then a large amount of construction in cities that's quickly filled at a slightly lower price does benefit those people, even if prices aren't lowered.

Tokyo isn't. Guess why.

Saitama.

Prices are crazy out to Gunma now if you're on a shinkansen line.

Saitama the sprawling suburb or Saitama the One Punch Man?

Six of one, half a dozen of the other.

Tokyo isn't. Guess why.

Because Japan is utterly stagnant as a whole?

Tokyo is not stagnant in terms of population.

https://viz.wtf/post/158158642063/tokyo-population-over-the-years-look-at-what (Yes, the graph is bad, but it's the only one I can find with years after 2010.)

Since about 2000, Japan is (on a per-capita basis) no more stagnant than the US. If Tokyo were full of NIMBYs, people could afford to pay more.

https://i0.wp.com/fabiusmaximus.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Per-Capita-Real-GDP-of-US-and-Japan.png?resize=889%2C400&ssl=1

If you want to find a metric on which Tokyo and major US cities/metro areas differ, try housing units built. In Tokyo, this was about 100k units/year since 1998.

https://www.nippon.com/en/japan-data/h00782/

So why don't landlords increase prices to capture more of that GDP growth? Because Tokyo has nearly 1M vacant apartments and if a landlord increases prices too much their flat will join the vacant pool. Simple as that.

At peak housing bubble, the entire state of California managed 150k houses/year and as of 2016 it was about 50k.

https://journal.firsttuesday.us/wp-content/uploads/California-Annual-Construction-2017.png

As I mentioned in another thread, we could build 19M homes in Santa Clara alone if we simply increased the density to that of San Francisco. We just choose not to.

Because they've built more houses in Tokyo than in like all of California in the last decade. Zoning in Japan is not local so they've added tons of new housing units where demand rose.

I don’t think any of this applies to America. We have in America one city that has any density. Chicago literally has entirely abandoned neighborhoods close to the city core that aren’t developed because too many people shoot each other. This is the standard in America.

We might need some density enabling technologies to get things going - basically get cars off roads but America has a long way to add density.

And as below we could add ghost cities. Why can’t we make a giant metropolis in Oklahoma? And build it to 30 million people.

I’m against mass immigration for HBD reasons but there’s no reason why America can’t grow out cities and cut home prices. Maybe if we had a billion people we would need to think harder about it,

Why can’t we make a giant metropolis in Oklahoma? And build it to 30 million people.

Or better - why can't we make a giant metropolis in Silicon Valley? The current population density of the San Jose-San Francisco-Oakland, CA Combined Statistical Area) is 1.1k/sq mi and it has 7.7M people. The density of Brooklyn is 38k/sq mi and San Francisco is 18k/sq mi.

If we increased the density of Silicon Valley to that of Brooklyn, we could fit 266M people there. We could fit 21M people alone in Santa Clara (San Jose plus a couple of suburbs) if we increased the density to San Francisco or Cambridge levels.

If you want to do it on unoccupied land, there is literally unoccupied land the size of San Jose directly adjacent to San Jose.

One of the big problems is that for upper-class liberals HBD and cultural explanations for crime are both verboten. So many of them believe that high rises cause crime.

We could.

Though admittedly I always thought it would be better to have your concrete jungle built in the Great Plains and reserve your coastal areas for vacations. I think a lot of things like water, infrastructure etc would be easier built in those areas. If we had a big improvement in air travel somewhere like Oklahoma could be 2 hours away from Miami or San Fran for leisure. But that’s far higher level planning. The big thing with cities is a few settled there because they were nice habitats then a lot more came because there were a lot of people there.

Doesn't that me that many people would want to live in a Santa Clara even with Stanford and Silicon Valley relocated to a new location, purely for the weather?

The costs of moving freight and supplies like water become pretty important. Beijing has been piping in water from pretty far away (800+mi, 1400+km) and has committed to one of the largest infrastructure projects in the world to sustain the city. A very rough approximation for freight has planes costing ten times as much as trucks costing twice as much as rail costing three times as much as barge. When multiplied across everything a city needs, that ends up costing a lot raising costs of living in a big way. There's a reason most major cities that arose from non-political pressures are on ports. Political capitals might be placed elsewhere for military or historic (read whims/personal history of rulers) reasons but extracting resources from the provinces to feed and fuel the capital has been known to cause trouble when resources become scarce.

Most things that are shipped by water are first shipped by land to port then port to city. So a megapolis somewhere in a milder climate in the Great Plains would just be surrounded by a giant plain that could direct ship all the foodstuff by rail. Rail being more expensive than sea wouldn’t be an issue for a lot of goods because the things coming by port first need shipped to a major port then by sea.

When I’ve traveled around anecdotally I felt like Texas had the cheapest grocery prices.

Energy would be the key bottleneck for people living in a central megapolis and traveling to coast for play. Cheaper nuclear or geothermal would make that a lot more feasible.

If you stick it along the Mississippi you can probably keep quite a bit of cheap water transport.

Not with the Jones Act, you can't.

anecdotally I felt like Texas had the cheapest grocery prices

This could be due to taxes, low overhead(labor and rent, mostly) or more intense price competition. I seriously doubt that Texas has notably more rail shipment than other states.

because the things coming by port first need shipped to a major port

Major manufacturing in China is in port cities around Shanghai, Zhejiang and Guangdong for the most part, particularly for things shipped abroad. If you wanted to you could build up some place like Omaha but aside from odd balls like Denver or Cheyenne, most of the big existent Great Plains cities are on tributaries to the Missouri for a reason. (Even those two are on forks of the Platte but not really navigable.)

I don’t think it makes sense to argue cities which depend on network effects have to be on rivers today because when they were founded 200 years ago were on rivers.

A lot of newer cities are not on rivers - Phoenix, Las Vegas etc. We don’t run on 18th century tech anymore.

And yea Chinese stuff would be harder to ship there. But things like most food would be easier to ship.

Container ships are not 18th century tech. Standardized containerization (the physical one, not the VM replacement tech) is one of the major logistic technologies of 20th century that makes possible much of modern consumer life. (I would note that even simple logistic technology like standardized palletization is not universal, see: RU army logistics and why supplying positions away from rail lines is such a struggle for them.) It's not a tech level thing anyways so much as a cost of inputs thing. There needs to be a very good reason to be paying twice or more the cost of an input. Maybe an inland location has benefits that outweighs the additional cost but it has to actually be factored in especially when talking the volumes of inputs for a proposed megapolis.

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A lot of newer cities are not on rivers - Phoenix, Las Vegas etc.

Point of order as a Phoenecian: we may not have rivers in our city limits, but we sure do have canals.

I was looking at Omaha and a few others towards the end of the line, and realized it'd take an enormous amount of dredging to get the river straight and deep enough. From the numbers I found it sounds like rail has gotten competitive with all but deep draft high volume barges.

Most of them don't do a lot of river traffic anymore. Heck even Houston used to get steamboats up the Trinity route back around the civil war and that was before the sandbars at the mouth were cleared. Rail from an actual port is reasonably priced at this point but if the volume were to treble or increase by larger factors it becomes a bigger issue.

I think you could get away without barge shipping for a non-industrial city, given that it seems to be used mostly for coal, ore, and other bulk stuff these days, but water supply would be a huge limiting factor.

Barges get pretty specific to the waterways they operate on but container barges can do a lot to service a city inland of a major port. Grain is also one of the bigger uses for barges.

I think we should copy China in constructing new urban centers from scratch. Recall the 'ghost cities' that they were building a few years that the media was decrying as wasteful. For one thing, it's like a starving person sneering at an obese person for being too fat. They clearly have the opposite problem to us. Secondly, many of them have filled up by now. They planned ahead, thinking about what would happen in 15-20 years as urbanization increased - we clearly haven't.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Under-occupied_developments_in_China

Building new urban centers makes more sense than upgrading existing ones. If you upgrade, you disrupt whatever's going on in the area, there are endless delays as you stumble over old tunnels or knock down asbestos-laden buildings. There are efficiencies of scale in just building an 8-lane motorway from the start rather than upgrading 4 to 6 to 8. You don't need to worry about obsolete tech, you can install proper insulation and rationalize heating... It just makes more sense.

Build some new cities, slap down a Special Economic Zone there too, where you get tax concessions for starting a new business. That would attract people. It'd stimulate the economy by creating lots of construction jobs too.

It's appealing, but the US doesn't have a strong coercive mechanism like China does to force movement to a new city. It can only incentivize it.

I get the feeling that people in America consider themselves above somewhere new just for the sake of it. There are plenty of T2/T3 cities that are cheaper than NY and SF. People do move there, but slowly. Even newly popular cities for migration like Austin have been around and cooler than the baseline for decades. A city rising from the cornfields in Kansas with a lot of roundabouts won't bring anyone out there until there are tiki bars and a big poly scene.

Cities are dynamic things. Why do you assume everyone will congregate in fewer and fewer of them? Austin was a college town before Dell and Motorola got going, there. Sun Belt cities with low taxes are attracting migrants from other U.S. metros — both people and businesses.

As the adoption of telecommuting was sped up by the pandemic, it has changed how employers weigh a city’s human and cultural capital against what a desk costs in that city. A desk in Jacksonville or Dallas costs way less than one in NYC or SF.

A potential counter to the above might be global warming if it drives people north and a bit inland.

Climate change isn't going to drive people anywhere on a timescale that matters to people living today. If anything, we are seeing a migration from northern areas to southern ones (at least in the U.S.). In terms of heating degree days, most of the northern U.S. and all of Canada is very energy intensive to live in compared to the southern U.S. This will continue to be the case for decades in the future even in worse-case scenarios. We still haven't fully realized the gains from the invention of AC, which happened in 1901.

Yes, but folks in cooler states aren’t going to consent to having their water diverted to the Southwest and southern California.

I don't this this is an issue either. Alfafa growers and dairy farmers in California might be in trouble, but there is ample water for human settlement. The biggest use is agriculture which would become much more efficient if water was priced higher.

Yes, but folks in cooler states aren’t going to consent to having their water diverted to the Southwest and southern California.

"Folks" don't have large amounts of water to divert. Agriculture uses c. 90% of the water essentially everywhere, and in the US that means large commercial agribusiness. Large businesses can be paid off - cheaply if they are using the water to irrigate low-value crops like alfalfa. Current water law in the US west mostly prohibits this type of transaction, but laws can be changed.

Why do you think alfalfa is low value? Should hay the primary input for milk and secondary input for beef and eggs be scarcer, more expensive? $7 for a dozen eggs is bad enough right now.

I didn't say anything about should, I said alfalfa was low value. A quick google says that alfalfa prices are about $240 per ton, and this is considered scandalously high with the long-term average price sub-$200. Wheat is $7.40 per bushel, which works out at about $270 per ton. Most crops worth irrigating are worth more than wheat, not less. Wikipedia says that alfalfa is 18% of California's irrigation water and 4% of the farm revenue - also consistent with low value.

I have no idea why eggs in California are $7 a dozen - it looks like they are quite a bit cheaper on the east coast. In the UK we pay about $3 a dozen, and our hens don't eat subsidised alfalfa. Does the $7 include reparations for black hens or something equally stupid?

Eggs in the US in general underwent a massive spike from a flu outbreak that wiped out a bunch of hens. The point of comparison is that minor absolute value but high percentage increases in price on common, high volume items like eggs greatly affect the day to day of consumers. Adding on to the current scarcity/pricing concerns for those items seems ill-advised to me but I'm economically insulated from it and will probably profit regardless. Alfalfa is a major hay crop for boosting productivity of dairy cows lowering the costs of milk among other uses for it in feeds. Constrain that crop and you'll have downstream effects on prices of things people care about like milk.

We have been adding lanes to highways since time immemorial (aka the 50s) and the congestion is still here.

Your induced demand analogy is wrong in 2 major ways.

First, Induced demand means that when more people can fit a car commute within their time budget, they do so, until the resource (lanes) runs out. But there is an upper limit to this : the number of people who need to commute on a daily basis. Or, the number of people who are employed in a salaried 9-5 job in that city. The upper bound is the number of salaried jobs available in that city.

Similarly, the number of people moving into a city will be upper bounded by some multiple of the number of salaried jobs that the city can support. People aren't asking for 'free' rent. They want the rent to reach this lower bound where demand tapers off.

The second mistake is the obvious counter to induced demand. People talk about induced demand to support funding for public transit: a more efficient form of transportation that scales far better with increasing demand. YIMBYs are effectively asking for the public transit equivalent of Single-family-homes. Why not have a more efficient form of housing that scales better with increasing demand, if increasing demand is inevitable.

You make my point for me. Highways are terrible for the same reason single family homes are terrible. Induced demand is a reality. Transit is a good solution because it addresses induced car-lane demand better just as apartment-buildings do for induced housing demand.

So there is real demand to live in London.

And it historically kept being met. In the 1980s people randomly decided that cities around the world were 'full'. By what mechanism did the degree of fullness get determined and why stop at this arbitrary time in the late 20th century ? (rhetorical question of course)

Almost every capital city in the developed world (and big parts of developing) is struggling with unaffordable rent, insane house price rises etc.

The struggle is not proportional or comparable at all.

India has entire dense metro cities springing up on the out-skirts of Mumbai, Delhi, Bangalore and Hyderabad. These outskirts city have (planned or completed) fast metro transportation to the city core and very reasonable prices. Downtown & the coolest suburbs are expensive, but new re-development projects are adding dozens of extra floors and the price-per-sq-ft for these new fancier-apartments is actually a bit lower than the houses they were replacing.

The American rise in housing prices without a proportional increase in city population is unique. American city prices are soaring as populations stay stable. Something is off.

are freedom of movement and affordable housing compatible at all

I am glad you asked that. I would say 'yes' to a point and the US is the farthest away from that point, ie. as long as housing supply is flexible.

In 95% of American cities, the answer is a resounding 'yes' and in the last 5% it is still a resounding 'yes' once you go 5 miles away from the city core. Freedom of movement does become a problem when a city has vertically 'topped out'. But no US city is anywhere close to facing that problem right now. (Yes, not even NYC. Lower Manhattan, Midtown, & central-park-areas are the only topped out areas of NYC. Brooklyn & Queens are practically sprawling.)

there is the minor problem that I have with YIMBY people

Be more specific what you mean by YIMBY people. People who ask for a free-market in housing ? People who ask for the world's most restrictive zoning to be more in line with the global overton window? People who want the possibility of transit to exist and want density around said transit ? People who want to walk and be healthy ? People who are simply sick of paying too many taxes subsidizing a wasteful (in energy & money) lifestyle choice that is being shoved up their throats ?

Americans complaining about YIMBYs is the equivalent of Imams crying about women wanting to not wear an eye-slot burqa. "Have the YIMBYs gone too far ? How dare they ask to show nose-bridge in public or show ankle-bone." To the rest of the world, NIMBYs come across as clowns.

To extend this analogy further. A burqa clad woman asking to show her ankle bone is not a slippery slope to 3rd wave feminist post-gender society. The Muslim women just want some more rights within an oppressive system. But when the system is reluctant to give even that much, they react similar to women in Iran and choose loud revolt of the type that is deliberately meant to provoke. YIMBYs are in a similar place. They might have posters asking to eat landlords & creating a Le Corbusier-eque dream, but they are doing it more so to be provocative than as an actual ask.

Most YIMBYs just want uniform approval for 5+1 style apartment buildings, removal of deliberately obstructive building/parking codes and dense towers right on top of major public transit. Past that, allied groups want good transit infrastructure & protected bike lanes. This would be considered a NIMBY's dream in Europe or Asia. Only in the USA & Canada does this group pass off as as YIMBY.

I know I sound a little pissed off here. It is targeted more towards a hypothetical NIMBY in the sky than the OP necessarily.

I know I sound a little pissed off here. It is targeted more towards a hypothetical NIMBY in the sky than the OP necessarily.

You would have been better off deleting your entire section of calling your ideological opponents hypocritical, evil coded Muslims while in the same breath handwaving any criticism of your allies who might have some extreme rhetoric of their own.

evil coded Muslims

Just to be clear, I am pointing out the evil coded old-bearded-men in conservative Muslim society.

While their voting (if democracy, which it rarely is) constituents & global adherents of the religion bear some secondary blame for deferring to them as religious authorities, my choice of the bearded Muslim antagonist was deliberately meant to evoke a visceral negative reaction towards similarly antagonistic NIMBYs. Yes.

any criticism of your allies

I meant that those criticisms were fair. But, while I was talkin about hypothetical NIMBYs who very much exist and dominate American society. The criticisms towards YIMBYs are pointed towards strawmen who either don't exist or are collectively mocked within the YIMBY community themselves.

For reference, look at the biggest public voices in YIMBY urbanism:

  • Strong Towns - The OG. A self-proclaimed conservative organization that advocates for multi-family middle-housing. They come at it from the POV of community building, economic sustainability and in some sense : family values. Their seminars are more math than activism given by a boring old professor.

  • City Beautiful - A professor in Coastal California, who takes a practical and holistic approach to finding win-no-lose outcomes in the NIMBY vs YIMBY war. His academic approach is the polar opposite of activism. His videos clearly show him caring for the preservation of urban architecture, local values and nature, while pushing for greater density. ('Oh the Urbanity' is similarly tame and reconciliatory in any of the issues they champion.)

  • RM Transit - The guy loves trains more than anyone in the world. But even he is critical of haphazardly adopted YIMBY policies and white-elephant transit projects that will come back to haunt the city in years to come. (ex: China's stubborn expansion of high speed rail in low-usage corridors)

  • Alan Fischer, Adam Something, (info-humor channels) - Even deep into meme territory, urbanism channels remain grounded and I have yet to see anything too objectionable being passed under the guise of 'haha, is a joke'.

  • Not just bikes , Climate town - These 2 the closest to activism channels, and are fairly tame as far as activism channels go. Like all activism channels, there is some snark here, but it makes sense given that both come from more jaded allied fields of Climate Change and Bike Infrastructure. The former worried about a future that will kill us all, and the latter worried about a present where roads definitely kill all cyclists.

  • Steve Hicks - On the urbanist architects side of things, Steve very much focuses on preserving aesthetics and quality-of-life while talking public spaces & urban design that leans YIMBY.

Popular YIMBYs being academics (and Canadian) more often than not, leads to them being fairly measured & polite in what they ask for. On the point of allies, YIMBYs often don't get along too well with their allies.

YIMBYs don't particularly care about social progressivism, especially vocally community oriented conservative ones like Strong Towns. YIMBYs advocate for strong ties with the executors of the law (police) which rubs the rest of the 'allies' the wrong way. Protection of share public spaces (transit, parks, side walks) is vital to YIMBYs, and they aren't onboard with the whole 'let the homeless spit fentanyl in my face' project that the some social progressive allies seem to be tolerating.

If you could point me to popular voices who represent the Strawman YIMBY, then I am all ears. But until then, I will continue to be asymmetrical in how I treat my enemies extremists vs the ones in my own fold.

Be more specific what you mean by YIMBY people. People who ask for a free-market in housing ?

To first order, there aren't any. The self-styled YIMBYs want to turn areas where people are living less densely into Manhattan through legislation and regulation, and the people living there want to prevent that the same way.

through legislation and regulation

Or deregulation, to be precise. Legislation and regulation are what keeps suburbs full of SFHs with no shops or other workplaces.

This is a classic "lack of charity", accusing your ideological opponents of not holding the views they say they do based on basically nothing

I'd be happy with converting some single family home areas into duplexes and duplex areas into more garden style.

Santa Clara County, CA has a density of 2.3 people per acre. It has a median home selling price of 1.2 million as of Nov. 2022. Just letting that rise to 3.5 people per acre (a bit less than 15,000 sq feet of land per person) by allowing more for R1 zoned lots to build duplexes and other low intensity increases in density would make a huge difference in the available homes without cramming manhattan style skyscrapers.

San Francisco has almost 30 people per acre for reference. Manhattan is over 100. 3.5 peoe per acre is not manhattan, but it's 50% more houses than currently in the county.

This is a disingenuous view of “regulation”. OP specifically said free market, and broadly YIMBYs push for less restrictive regulations. Just because your single family home gets zoned for a triplex doesn’t require you to build one. You just can’t stop your neighbor from selling the house you don’t own to a developer who will.

Similarly, the number of people moving into a city will be upper bounded by some multiple of the number of salaried jobs that the city can support.

And it historically kept being met. In the 1980s people randomly decided that cities around the world were 'full'. By what mechanism did the degree of fullness get determined and why stop at this arbitrary time in the late 20th century ?

The 80s were the inflection point of an economic change, where now the number of salaried jobs increases as the people in the city increase. In the old days, a city would be built around a resource, often a trade route, that had some absolute size of economic surpluss to be extracted. There were jobs for the people extracting it, those brought people in, then there were jobs for services for those people, which brought more people in, etc, but this would taper off quickly and the population stayed limited. Then with industrialisation, you could create surplus anywhere. But you still need food as an input for the workers, and initially that still limited the growth of the cities by how far it could (afford to) be transported. But eventually, technology became so good that its now basically irrelevant where a city is. Really only container ship access matters, and thats a matter of if. ~Noone who has it is physically blocked from expanding it. Now, the best place to run your generic company is in the biggest city, and so it the best place to look for a job, and the only price that can go against it is that of the space.

If you solve this by just building ever more, the result is maybe ten gigantic cities in the whole world (plus small mining towns scattered far apart). And that might be the most efficient thing to do in some sense, but housing still wont be as cheap as it used to. Things just want to clump together now, and they will always want a bit more.

The American rise in housing prices without a proportional increase in city population is unique. American city prices are soaring as populations stay stable. Something is off.

The problem is an Anglosphere one, rather than an American one - in fact the problem is less bad in the non-California US than it is in the UK or Australia. Hong Kong is a housing disaster (despite not being short of land - most of the island is unbuilt and the New Territories are not exactly dense). New Zealand went full YIMBY in the last few years, but was even worse than the UK or Australia. Singapore is a special case because they have housing communism for citizens, but free market rents for resident foreigners are through the roof. Even Mumbai has NIMBY problems. OTOH, continental Europe is in a much better state (Paris and Barcelona are the only unaffordable cities), and Tokyo is the one megacity that has actually done what OP suspects is impossible and outbuilt demand.

New Zealand went full YIMBY

I would actually love to know more about what happened in New Zealand. I don't know much about their system.

From what I understand about Australia, theirs is a Canadian problem, where high immigration forces the cities to be further aggressive in terms of housing.

Hong Kong is a housing disaster

I know of Hongkong's odd conundrum. Not sure why so much land goes unbuilt. I think something like 7% of HongKong's area is residential. That sounds like a NIMBY nightmare. Wonder if it caught the tail end of anglo influence with car centric zoning.

Even Mumbai has NIMBY problems

I haven't heard too much about this. The new development rate on Mumbai outskirts and the redevelopment rate within the city is incredibly high. There is a huge squatting & rent control / 100 yr lease problem. But, I haven't seen much NIMBYism. My entire family is still in Mumbai, and my entire neighborhood (in western suburbs) in undergoing redevelopment. Everyone has been eager for this, because it will replace our X-th floor K-bedroom apartment with a X+5th floor K+2 bedroom apartment, with rent for the displacement duration fully paid for.

Mumbai is building at an incredible rate. Parts of the city are perpetually dusty because of the sand being dumped anywhere and everywhere in the city for cement formation.

South Bombay is famously NIMBY, but they are snooty-assholes who are scared of the middle-class intruding on their upper-class oasis. Fuck em. There is NIMBYism around being permanently displaced by metro lines, but that is universal.

Paris and Barcelona are the only unaffordable cities

Are Paris suburbs also unaffordable ? I know that a lot of Parisians don't live in the city because the suburbs are dense, walkable and well connected to the city core by transit. Paris's regional rail is incredible.

Barcelona faces unimaginable pressures. Immense tourism pressure, probably the best city in the world to be a digital nomad in, incredible weather. Dense to the point of bursting. Architectural preservation is a completely fair reason for opposing new construction. If I had to name a perfect city, that would be it. It is kind of built to capacity. I don't blame them for being unable to accommodate more people. They have a hard problem on their hands. Maybe build a ghost city out of town with high speed rail connection to the city core ?

Hong Kong is a unique case.

Rather than owning the land, the land is leased from the government in 50-year increments. The only exception are old village rights that date back to the really, really early fishing village tier Hong Kong, which are worth millions now even if the land is undeveloped.

This is pretty much the primary source of funding the government gets. Every time a land, apartment, or house sale happens, the government gets a cut (this is referred to as "paying the land price") as they still own the land. There are also esoteric rules about how an apartment is taxed ("usable area").

The government is therefore incentivized to limit the amount of land that can be developed as housing to keep land prices high, even if it wasn't being used as a speculative asset by Mcdonalds, other corporations, and anyone in the mainland looking to liquidate yuan in favor of more secure financial holdings. They are also more interested in leasing to corporations or holdings with significant existing assets rather than individuals, as there is more collateral (this explains Hong Kong's endless malls).

There are significant benefits to this, like extremely low salary taxes and a government that experiences frequent windfalls distributed back to the populace in other ways, but on the whole most people under 30 have given up owning an apartment. It is possible, but you need to keep a highly paid (often highly stressful) job for 25+ years with no speed bumps, and significant money to pay up the first installment of the mortgage.

The key difference between big city housing and traffic is that you are worse off the more other drivers are on the road (the externalities are just negative) while the reason you want to live in a big city is because of the net benefits (net positive externalities) of living near the other people.

while the reason you want to live in a big city is because of the net benefits (net positive externalities) of living near the other people.

This is overly strong phrasing, imo. I personally find cities hideously uncomfortable and claustrophobic.

Sure. I have no desire to live in New York City, I wouldn’t want to live in a hypothetical New York City where all eight million people are gainfully employed, sober, and mentally healthy, and that doesn’t actually have much bearing on his point. People who want to live in cities generally want to live in cities because they derive some benefit from doing so, often economic or social.

This seems like a totally silly line of argument. People are making the choice rationally, what is a positive to you may be a negative to you and vice versa but one doesn't need to prove the appeal to something people are intentionally doing.

People are making the choice rationally

Some people are. Many people are. Most people are. Sure. I'm just noting that it ought to have another qualifier there. "Living in a big city is a net positive" is not an absolute state. Depending on how you class suburbs, it could well be below 50%.

Me as well, so I don't live in a city.

Me too but the more people who want to live in a dense urban center the fewer will want to crowd whatever rural town I may find to reside.

So do I, but can you really deny the benefits? I chose to live in the countryside and I really do prefer it, but there's hardly a day on which I'm not inconvenienced by all the things the city has that the middle of nowhere does not.

So do I, but can you really deny the benefits?

Yeah, I can. Prices are higher in cities (not just for housing) which eats into the benefit of higher wages, and if you can work remote you can get big city level wages while living in the middle of nowhere. The only real advantage I see to cities is access to a wide variety of stores/food/cultural activities.

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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.

Ah, good old "induced" demand. Or, to put it more properly, plain old demand.

If a 4 lane highway was fully congested, such that X number of people could travel on it, and it was expanded to 8 lanes keeping commute times equal, that's 2X the number of people traveling that route.

Those people don't appear from a vacuum, they're primarily composed of those for whom the marginal cost of travel has dropped to the extent that they are now willing to take that route by car, instead of an alternative means of transportation, or even simply not traveling at all. Given their revealed preferences, they have to be getting some utility from the change, or they wouldn't bother.

Similarly, even if more housing was built, and prices didn't drop by much, that would still be additional people finally able to purchase the home of their dreams, at a price they're evidently willing to pay for. That price may seem stiff to you, or you simply might not share their priorities, but at the end of the day, people are getting what they want, namely a house with the amenities of a big city.

Ah, good old "induced" demand. Or, to put it more properly, plain old demand.

If a 4 lane highway was fully congested, such that X number of people could travel on it, and it was expanded to 8 lanes keeping commute times equal, that's 2X the number of people traveling that route.

The difference between a wider highway and a better public transit is that widening a highway doesn't benefit existing drivers. If your commute took 30 minutes on a four-lane highway and they added four more lanes and now twice as many people use it, your commute is still 30 minutes.

Whereas if you had to stand on a bus that came every 30 minutes, and they added more buses and now they come every 15 minutes, but twice as many people use it and you still have to stand, your waiting time has improved. If they replace the bus route with a light rail that comes every five minutes and is twice as fast and even more people use it and you still have to stand, you still get the benefit of nonexistent waiting times and a much faster commute.

Is building denser housing more like building more lanes or like building public transit? I honestly think we still do not know. At first glance, it feels more like adding more lanes, but if you decuple the density of housing, you also decuple the density of amenities within reach and can even support less universally appealing amenities that require a certain number of visitors to survive.

But it doesn't solve the problem with the affordability. If you give 60% of your income to live in one bedroom in London, adding more housing will just increase the number of people that give 60% of their income. Because the demand to live in London (or Manhattan) is virtually unlimited. We can't supply side out of it.

We want existing people to pay 30% not to have more 60% ters. Which requires somehow to destroy the demand.

What do you say about Tokyo? I haven't bothered to fact check, but it is commonly claimed that they built their way into affordable housing.

Why can't we supply side our way out of it? The median rent in Manhattan is $4000, while in the US is $2000 per month. Suppose all of the country's housing were in Manhattan; if so, even if everyone in the country then moved to Manhattan, wouldn't the median rent in Manhattan be $2000?*

Alternatively, if an earthquake destroyed half of the housing units in Manhattan tomorrow, do you have any doubt that the reduction of supply would cause rents to increase? Of course it would. But, why should supply changes operate only in one direction?

*Ceteris paribus, obviously. Who knows what the downstream effects would be. But the point; since demand is made up of both the willingness to buy and the ability to buy, any income changes as a result

If you give 60% of your income to live in one bedroom in London, adding more housing will just increase the number of people that give 60% of their income.

Looks to me like those people are willing to spend 60% of their income on housing. Are they being forced to spend that much? Do they not have have the option to move to somewhere with a lower COL? Is their only alternative literal homelessness?

If the answer to all of the above is no, then I'm hard pressed to see a problem in need of solving!

Amen! I’m always surprised when libertarian aligned folks argue against building housing.

We want existing people to pay 30% not to have more 60% ters. Which requires somehow to destroy the demand.

Why? Who's we? More specifically you're asserting affordability is the problem and it must be solved but that's not a shared prior.

Why do you want people to have more expensive goods? Does this only apply to housing, or to other stuff as well?

Only applies to Londoners (living on the unceded territory of the RomanesRomani people). Why should that specific housing be made cheaper for the people who want to live there specifically at the cost of everything and everyone else?

Everything and everyone else doesn't pay a cost when the rent or buying price for housing goes down.

And mentioning the Romans at all is, plainly, retarded. The fuck?

That’s a great rebuttal

Something about the “more roads doesn’t lower traffic” argument never sat well with me. Seems obvious it’s still a net good to build bigger roads

Let me present an alternative position then.

Why is it good to have more of something? Why is the reign of quantity legitimate? Why have thousands of people on that road when you can have ten?

The utilitarian calculus rests on the assumption that it is always better to have more. But this is an unquestioned axiom.

The real reason to pile people on top of each other like this is that this is the main way modernity maintains and extends itself. With higher levels of specialization requiring ever more specialists.

But is that a good? I'm not so sure. Would anyone really argue that China is greater than Switzerland just because it has more people in it?

I think it’s because we are allowing more people to pick driving who want to. The demand is there, so why not meet it? The only rebuttal I can think of is that it will accelerate climate change, but if we have better cars such as electric or hybrid maybe that won’t matter

Aesthetically I agree with you, but in practical terms yes, China is several times greater than Switzerland by many kinds of metric.

Aesthetically I agree with you

I contend that there are no other metrics.

If you want to say that China is greater for any reason it ultimately boils down to aesthetics.

Be it Rawlsian or be it Nybblerish of me, I don't find it safe to assume that I won't be among the unwanted excess when people start talking about less being better than more.

Which is of course why the search for abundance is stable. I too want entire galaxies for my children.

Doesn't make it inherently good, or sustainable.

In this case, more dense housing and more lanes of congested highway mean more people are living in a place they want to live and reaching the places they need to be, which seems like an unvarnished good compared to living somewhere they like less because it's the Nth next best option.

I mean it's a large debate, but I don't think the satisfaction of desire is unambiguously good.

Isn't that what a price actually means though? How much people want a thing compared to how easily such a thing can be acquired. That's what pricing people out of cities is, allocating the scarce, desirable resource (living in the city) to the people most willing to pay for it, and encouraging people who may find living somewhere else while pocketing the sale of their living situation more valuable to sell. Trying to solve anything else with policy is trying to set some sort of alternate goal non? Whether it be to increase density without raising prices or maintaining high prices as a store of value for residents by restricting new/alternative products.

As far as I'm concerned, as are most actual Economists, the true price of something is simply what people are willing to pay for it.

Unless people are literally unable to find any place to live, I can only offer my condolences if they're priced out of living where they simply want to live.

It seems to me that much of the housing "crisis" in the West arises from attempts to intentionally distort the dynamics of a free market. It might be done with noble aims, or naked NIMBYism, but barring the arrival of effective post-scarcity, we simply can't just give everyone their ideal mansion in the middle of the hottest part of the city.

(This coming from a guy who's girlfriend wants to buy a house in London. My bank account already groans under that demand, but I hold no illusions regarding whether we deserve such accomodation.)

But a place is more than economic abstraction. A working class Londoner that has rented in London since his grand grand father died at Passchendaele for me has more right to live in London compared to the son of an African dictator. It matters how long you have been in a place for me.

You are talking about cultural and family roots. "Rootless cosmopolitans" have thoroughly destroyed such concepts. At least in practice.

I don't really care to get into the bigger picture for everyone here, but the opposite is true for me. If I want to stay near my family, where it's lived for generations yet, near my siblings, my mother, my aunt, my grandmother, I effectively can't pay the rent for anything beyond a shoebox. If we built more and rented those places out or sold them on the market, it might be cheap enough for me to live here yet. The issue isn't the 'rootless cosmopolitans', it's fifty-something people and up with their own houses who hate any new housing getting built that might yet drive me away.

The dominant ideology in cities denies any such connection though. A nativist might be able to pull it off, but you can't have atomized global cities without utterly disenfranchising the locals in the medium term.

Nativism applied to an ancient city founded by colonizers absent a pre-existing settlement and who has rights to it can be a fun problem though.

I think this is a good summary of an import part of the problem. Location is the ultimate scarce resource. I think it may be some of the impetus behind Zuckerberg going for the VR gamble. Remote work can definitely alleviate some of the issue as can the natural equilibrium that comes in as land gets so expensive that the amount you can get if you move away from the city center gets larger and larger.

Living space is however only part of the problem, there is also the social spheres. High rent gets you in close proximity to people that can afford high rent and these people tend to have other desirable qualities that make them good neighbors.

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?

Because supply and demand is real, and the latter has effectively outpaced the former in much of the developed world. There's other causes, certainly, but I've never once heard a good argument for why one of the oldest concepts in economics doesn't apply here.

Okay - why do you think that there is some amount of supply that will satisfy the demand? Before we turn London into kwaloon walled city?

What about turning London (density 14k/sq mi) into Brooklyn (38k/sq mi), which would allow the population to double?

Why do NIMBYs constantly apply an excluded middle fallacy, thinking that the only possibilities are San Jose (population density 1.5k/sq mi) or Kowloon?

Why do NIMBYs constantly apply an excluded middle fallacy, thinking that the only possibilities are San Jose (population density 1.5k/sq mi) or Kowloon?

Because there are no limiting principles, no Schelling fences. Once you've turned San Jose into San Francisco, there's no reason not to go on to make it London, Brooklyn, Manhattan, or Kowloon.

There certainly is a limiting principle - it's when the marginal value of additional housing ~= marginal cost of providing it.

It's the exact same limiting principle that causes my local supermarked to be a pleasant place to shop instead of a warehouse sized ball pit full of rotting apples that customers don't want. Apple producers only make as many apples as they think customers want to buy at a price that makes them a reasonable profit.

And for any housing purchasers who don't want to live in such a place, they won't have to. If we turn Silicon Valley into a 266M person megalopolis by increasing density to Brooklyn levels, that leaves 67M people spread throughout the rest of a depopulated US. Plenty of space if you want to live there.

There certainly is a limiting principle - it's when the marginal value of additional housing ~= marginal cost of providing it.

So, Kowloon it is.

If we turn Silicon Valley into a 266M person megalopolis by increasing density to Brooklyn levels, that leaves 67M people spread throughout the rest of a depopulated US.

Which means the people already IN Silicon Valley either have to move or to put up with living in Brooklyn West, and they'd rather not. Which is why NIMBY. And quite possibly moving might not be an option, because of other things the same people who support YIMBY support -- "open space" preservation, anti-sprawl legislation, urban growth boundaries, and the like.

Houston and Tokyo (notable places that allow building houses) are not even close to Kowloon. So clearly the market equilibrium is not where you think.

You should actually pay attention to the numbers. The Brooklyn West phenomenon that you fear involves literally 2/3 of all Americans moving to Silicon Valley.

I am not aware of any YIMBY who has proposed moving 100% of America into NYC or Mega SV and banning houses anywhere else. You seem to have confused them with NIMBYs - the latter group is the folks who oppose building a Brooklyn density San Jose in the vacant land adjacent to San Jose.

If you want to talk housing in general: because demand is somewhat fixed and easily-enough met. You mention London, which I find a funny example, because London scarcely has more people in it than in 1939, right before the Germans started bombing. The sorts of developed nations that really struggle with housing are exactly the sorts of nations that don't really grow all that quickly.

There's other causes, certainly, but I've never once heard a good argument for why one of the oldest concepts in economics doesn't apply here.

Presumably it's the same "induced demand" explanation as for traffic jams: the demand curve is highly horizontal, so adding housing won't lower prices, it will just enable more people to pay the existing prices. If there are a large number of people who would pay existing prices but are effectively prevented from doing so by lack of availability, they will enter the market to keep the price the same. So now you have an even more crowded city that's just as expensive - maybe even more expensive, unless you also increase supply of every other good and service available at the same time.

This doesn’t sound right. Suppose there are 10 million people in the US who want to live in Manhattan. But it costs $5000/mo to live there, so 8 million of those people can't afford to move there. If supply increases such that the other 8 million can now afford to live in Manhattan, then the price must be low enough so that they can afford to live there, and it must stay low,not pop up, because otherwise they will no longer be able to afford it and will move out.

I am also skeptical that demand for housing is elastic, given that it is a necessity. Of course elasticity will be different in different areas and at different price points.

As for induced demand, that is not how it works. An induced demand eg is Long Island City. When a friend of mine was offered an apt there, he went in the evening to make sure stores were open, decent restaurants, etc.They were, and he took the apt. But, stores were open because there has been tons of building there for the past 20 years. 25 yrs ago, there were few local amenities because there were few residents. The new housing made the area more desireable, thereby increasing demand for housing there and driving up the rent for the apts that had been there all along. That is induced demand.

Of course, no one cares about the price of housing in Long Island City per se. They care about housing in NYC, and all that housing in LIC siphoned off some of the demand for housing in Manhattan, making prices there and elsewhere in NYC lower than it otherwise would have been.

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Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


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