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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.
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.
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)
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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