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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.
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.
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.
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.
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