I wonder how close the correlation actualy is.
Cities with least price increases: Austin, Raleigh, Atlanta, Vegas, Charlotte, Phoenix...all of them in states leaning Republican.
Cities with most price increases: San Jose, Boston, NYC, LA, Seattle, San Diego, DC... all of them in states leaning Democratic.
Could it be because of the parties' philosophies about regulations? Conservatives would let you build without much hassle, thus letting supply meet demand. Liberals, on the other hand, would regulate and constrain the supply.
Apart from political ideologies, what could be other possible reasons for such disparity?
I didn't check all of them, but these are the least dense cities in the second group, in people per sq mile:
1. San Jose: 5000
2. San Diego: 4000
LA is 8000. NYC is 28000.
For the former, "build without hassle" group, here are the highest densities
1. Atlanta: 3360
2. Austin: 3358
3. Raleigh: 3158
4. Phoenix: 3025
Las Vegas is 1659, Charlotte is 2720.
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I pulled the numbers from Wikipedia. Here's an alternate theory: the cities in the second list are pretty full. So costs go up, despite the fact that the cities are unusually dense.
Further, it's impossible to build NYC in modern America. Zoning laws now require more sprawl. The cities in the first list are mostly building low density housing. (Hint: even tall buildings neighborhoods can be low density if built wrong.)
Where does all the extra water come from?
Where does the extra sewage get processed?
Where do you bury the extra garbage?
San Francisco: 18,451
Tokyo: 16,000
San Francisco is not all that high, but denser than Tokyo. Cities don't need to be high to be dense. That's one of the biggest misconceptions. Most of the world's high density cities don't do so by using skyscrapers.
The actual problem? I think it comes down to two factors:
1. Almost all density in NA was built pre-car
2. So density is limited by the size of areas that were built in the pre-car area.
Taller buildings isn't necessarily the answer. Narrower streets is a larger determinant of density. But it's very hard to tear down streets, make them narrower and add new buildings.
It's especially hard to rebuild the suburbs around cities like San Francisco and make them more San Francisco-like. If the whole Bay area was built like SF, there would be no silicon valley rent crisis. Yet for some reason everyone focuses on SF.
I'm writing this in Montreal, a city built like SF. It's infuriating that this whole debate happens without people googling density stats.
How many people would have guessed that SF is denser than Tokyo, per square mile? Tokyo is bigger, and holds more people, because the Japanese have sensible zoning. But "tall buildings" is not how they do it over the whole span of the megalopolis.
My main point is that SF is not the problem. It's the Bay Area.
It's the bay area around SF that fails to be dense. The Bay Area as a whole is around 1000.
I agree the US should be denser. I'm just wondering why all the attention is focussed on a place that, relatively speaking, is already doing a rather good job on density as far as America goes.
For that matter, Paris is largely low rise. I'm generally in favour of low rise density. I'm trying to figure out why everyone ignores that model, and argues for tall buildings instead.
In general, less population density , small homogenous towns ,leans Republican, and high density, where people encounter more people less like themselves, lean Democrat.
The most expensive citiesare coastal cities that have geographical barriers to growth.
Remember this is the same Austin that Uber is decrying for over-regulation compared to other cities.
The real question is why do the cities on the coast prosper, even in a recession, and those in Flatland shrink? Why wasn't the tech labour market in NYC and SF in 2003 and 2007 half as affected as the labour market in Dallas or Austin, even though rents in SF are astronomical?
Country side / low density = Republican.
You'll find this correlation pretty much everywhere in the world: big cities are progressive and the country side is conservative.