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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.
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.
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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