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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31233 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.

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.

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