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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.
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.
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.
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