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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.
Okay - why do you think that there is some amount of supply that will satisfy the demand? Before we turn London into kwaloon walled city?
What about turning London (density 14k/sq mi) into Brooklyn (38k/sq mi), which would allow the population to double?
Why do NIMBYs constantly apply an excluded middle fallacy, thinking that the only possibilities are San Jose (population density 1.5k/sq mi) or Kowloon?
Because there are no limiting principles, no Schelling fences. Once you've turned San Jose into San Francisco, there's no reason not to go on to make it London, Brooklyn, Manhattan, or Kowloon.
There certainly is a limiting principle - it's when the marginal value of additional housing ~= marginal cost of providing it.
It's the exact same limiting principle that causes my local supermarked to be a pleasant place to shop instead of a warehouse sized ball pit full of rotting apples that customers don't want. Apple producers only make as many apples as they think customers want to buy at a price that makes them a reasonable profit.
And for any housing purchasers who don't want to live in such a place, they won't have to. If we turn Silicon Valley into a 266M person megalopolis by increasing density to Brooklyn levels, that leaves 67M people spread throughout the rest of a depopulated US. Plenty of space if you want to live there.
So, Kowloon it is.
Which means the people already IN Silicon Valley either have to move or to put up with living in Brooklyn West, and they'd rather not. Which is why NIMBY. And quite possibly moving might not be an option, because of other things the same people who support YIMBY support -- "open space" preservation, anti-sprawl legislation, urban growth boundaries, and the like.
Houston and Tokyo (notable places that allow building houses) are not even close to Kowloon. So clearly the market equilibrium is not where you think.
You should actually pay attention to the numbers. The Brooklyn West phenomenon that you fear involves literally 2/3 of all Americans moving to Silicon Valley.
I am not aware of any YIMBY who has proposed moving 100% of America into NYC or Mega SV and banning houses anywhere else. You seem to have confused them with NIMBYs - the latter group is the folks who oppose building a Brooklyn density San Jose in the vacant land adjacent to San Jose.
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