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4. I think you forgot "build taller"?

" it is ironic how the modern urban population that is so quick to assign blame for climate change (to car owners, carnivores), social injustice (to white men, preferably older), or simply a lack of mobile network coverage fails to understand their own contribution to the problems of a modern city."

What are you talking about? Cars ARE half the problems of a modern city. Car owners are the other half. Rip out the damn parking and put in flats. Ban cars and put in bike lanes. They're far, far more efficient, and have the added benefit of not mowing down pedestrians and boiling children.

Good plan. More people per square meter. That means you have shorter ways and switch your congestion from the road or the subway to the elevator in your apartment complex. Might even be better for climate but does not sound like a better way of live.

If you want to remove car ownership you should try to provide an alternative that is actually better. If you want to avoid congestion, don't create a massive black hole in the center of each city that everything gravitates to.

Public transportation in Berlin is good, very good - it is the alternative that’s actually better. And the city does not have gravitating center for commuters - at least not the same way as other big cities: office density in Mitte or Kreuzberg is nothing compared to Manhattan or Moscow-City.

What's wrong with more people per square meter? Some of us like living in dense cities that you can navigate by walking and public transit.

"Nobody goes there anymore! It's too crowded", is basically what you sound like.

There are many many people in the world who love cities. All the things that you hate about cities, they love.

Cities make up like 1% of the world wide land use. How about we leave this 1% of land to the people who love cities, and let the rest of the people who don't, to have the other 99%?

Can't agree more. Your point is also applicable to people who delude themselves into believing an "off-grid" or "homestead" lifestyle is less burdensome to the environment or lends to a less consumerist way of life...

If you're _really_ off-grid, it probably is. A hermit living off the land in a wooden shack they make with hand tools and solar panels on top, using a mountain bike to get around, probably doesn't have much of a carbon footprint.

The main issue is when you're still basically on-grid but a long ways away from everything, and depend on a car.

Though I am probably biased because I just bought a bit of land and hope to grow my own food on it. Pretty easy bike ride from the train station, though, and I work 100% remote.

Rents out pace wages in suburbs and rural areas too. They rise in SF, Fresno and Anchorage. Even places people flee like Flint Michigan, land costs rise. They are unbearably high even in tiny apartment Tokyo where a 4m ceiling means you have no roof.

They rise in places with bad public transportation and good. The rise in supposedly under-priced Berlin and supposedly over priced San Francisco.

Land is not a normal commodity and the market has never fixed this anywhere using indirect tweaks. By all means, build more public transit but it won't fix housing prices anymore than it did in LA

While I do agree that land is different, sometimes I think the problem is that people see it as such. When housing markets rise people get rich, just like they do with e.g. stocks. The lack of affordability is a factor of inequality, and especially inequality in opportunities. That is why moving to a smaller cities isn't a solution for most people, because the problem is with opportunities which are appearing in cities and disappearing most everywhere else.

Stock, in principle, is an investment in an enterprise that creates wealth. Like building cars or growing wheat.

Buying and selling houses merely moves wealth around (typically from younger generations to older). It creates nothing, incentivizes nothing and looses more and more to mortgage holders. It can indeed make people rich but only to the degree someone else gets poorer.

The trend is for an ever growing number of single family homes to become rentals owned by investors. As prices rise further and further above middle class ability to afford, this trend will increase. You can make far more money buying a house and renting it than buying it and sitting in it. So in the long term owner-residents are never going to be able to compete for homes with large investor in an unregulated market.

It did fix housing prices in LA. That's why for the past 50 years LA has frozen its zoned capacity which used to be staggeringly high.

The LA metro didn't start construction until 1990. Prices have risen by a factor of 6 since then. Of course they probably would have risen even more but it was obviously inadequate to reduce prices.

McSweeney's already covered this subject well: "I Will Do Anything to End Homelessness Except Build More Homes" https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/i-will-do-anything-to-en....

Berlin will do anything to reduce housing costs except build more housing.

At least in big cities it is almost never that people don't want to build more, but that:

1. Property owner do not want to see their quite significant loans, or investments, decrease in value. 2. Renters do not want to get priced out of the city, having to leave a good job and move their kids away from their friends.

In addition to that while seemingly intuitive in practice building doesn't seem to decrease costs. Presumably because:

3. Land owners and construction companies want to make as much money as possible.

Unless you can override these three groups, or get them to agree, it is a social issue and building more will make things worse. Look at the record from essentially every city that has been building. If just building more worked there would be good examples and the far majority isn't.

3. Land owners and construction companies want to make as much money as possible.

Everyone does. Greed is only greed when it's someone else. Developers in cities with permissive land-use and zoning laws aren't better people than developers in cities like San Francisco or Vancouver. It's just that there are enough of them and there's enough development that they need to compete with each other.

Unless you can override these three groups, or get them to agree, it is a social issue and building more will make things worse. Look at the record from essentially every city that has been building

Stop. Just stop. Seriously. This trope needs to die now.

This is exactly what anti-housing advocates in Vancouver are claiming right now - that the city has been building and building and building, and prices just keep going up. So why give those awful developers what they want, right?

What they don't mention is that the metro area population is growing by more than 2% per year and compared to the number of homes being built each year, we're hopelessly behind. The reason prices keep going up is because we're not building enough, such is the incredible demand to live and work here. And I suspect this is the case with most cities with crazy-low rental vacancy rates and crazy high prices.

Berlin (and Vancouver, and San Francisco) will do anything to reduce housing costs except build more housing.

There’s quite a strong drive underway now to increase construction, and thanks to some rather bad political decisions 70 to 20 years ago, there are quite a few lots available for it.

The pipeline from planning to construction is a bit long and most of the projects are still a year or two away from breaking ground, but it is coming. There isn’t too much NIMBY opposition to housing, with the notable opposition of one successful referendum banning the re-zoning of (parts of) old Tempelhof airport.

> Due to the limits of public transportation

Fix this.

People live within n time of where they want to be. If people can travel faster then the space within n time can be greater.

This is the key to Tokyo and other very large metropolis cities.

Have public transport offer high speed and frequent rail routes, and then many local solutions from cycling, walking, buses, trams.

>This is the key to Tokyo and other very large metropolis cities.

But they also live in small apartments and homes. I'm not convinced that Tokyo is a good example here.

The key to this problem is to have jobs in places that aren't large urban centers. This way the population spreads out and housing becomes more affordable.

Don't think so. There are good reasons why the existing centers are drawing more and more people and business. Moving to the outside is often detrimental.

A better way may be to create new urban centers or develop lesser ones.

That creates gridlock, because even if people start by working close to their home, they'll change jobs and start commuting farther, and you can't have a dense network of public transport over a huge area, so people start using cars and clogging up everything.

> have jobs in places that aren't large urban centers

That creates a very different lower-density city. Think about a sprawl like LA rather than a squeeze like Manhattan. Public transport won't work but parking spaces might actually exist. Your Afghan Bagel place will be 1 hour drive rather than 15 minute by subway on the way to work etc. More space, but less selection and diversity in terms of food, entertainment and other venues.

Perhaps we can have jobs in smaller mid-size cities instead of only in big heavily populated (5+ million) metro areas.

This is also how Tokyo does it. There's no main, well-defined downtown where people go to work. Spreading the commutes across the whole transport network is a tremendous optimization.

I don't completely agree with your assumption that living in Tokyo means you need to live in a shoebox (and especially not in Osaka which is about 2/3rds the price of Tokyo), but actually I think there's a case for cheap, somewhat-cramped housing with good transit access to the city, for those who want it.

In Japan, a middle class family can own a somewhat cramped (say 900 sqft?) 3bedroom house/apartment walking distance to a world class rail system and generally walking distance to schools and some stores too.

In America's top cities, a middle class family can't afford to own a 3 bedroom apartment with rail access generally, so they move outside the city to the suburbs where they often have to drive to work - which means they need to buy a car, buy gas, etc

But if you don't want the lawn and the picket fence, why is this the only option available? We've taken a one-size-fits-all approach with covering the vast majority of the country with big suburban houses, and the free market is proving people want options, evidenced by wildly inflating prices of urban properties.

...also loans (in the USA) are determined on the size of the house as collateral. You are incentivized to buy a large house and small land. I would rather buy large land and a small house so that I can grow more food, trees, other natural resources. Our family has no need for a large house and they are inefficient to cool and heat.

> ...also loans (in the USA) are determined on the size of the house as collateral.

What are you talking about? The collateral is the full property, not just the structure.

Please don't spread out. Leave the forests and grasslands alone and don't just keep adding subdivisions just so people can have manicured lawns.

Its fair to say that the jobs could move to other city centers, but the solution isn't suburbia.

What would it take for America to have 20 New Yorks, instead of 50 Atlantas [1]

[1]: https://www.citylab.com/life/2014/04/ranking-most-sprawling-...

I guess almost any fix, including better transportation, will mean people/people's jobs will just concentrate faster, outpacing any deceleration of rent increases.

This is a very interesting idea, but I’m not convinced it’s true. Why do you think that might be the outcome?

Because people are urbanizing despite the price hikes. Which means they prefer higher rents to staying where they are or moving. Probably because of other factors like commuting, other common distances being shorter, friends and family.

So if higher prices are indeed a problem, holding people back from urbanizing, you'd think they'd urbanize faster if the pressures against it decrease.

It's certainly fair to think that there's some backlog of people who would move in if prices reach some price threshold, which could be considered resistance against the price falling lower than that threshold.

But in the case that you dont build units, you're still going to get some of that urbanization by those who can afford it (or are willing to struggle to survive in the city), and this will drive up prices even further.

s/Tokyo/Singapore/

If the government wants you to use public transport instead of private cars they have to provide great service 24/7

The more you invest in public transportation, the higher the rents will be.

Everyone and their cat wants to live as close as humanly possible to the hip center of the hip city.

I want to live as far from that place as possible.

Agreed. Especially with the homeless problem in Portland.

You are exaggerating a bit. When I visit Berlin in the summer months, what strikes me is the culture of bicycles, which is much stronger than in any USA city. I recall at 1 AM my friends said “We are going dancing now.” We then rode on bicycles for 45 minutes to get to Berghain. The hip people are willing to bike fairly far to get to the cool places.

I view it from a different approach. The city centers are the most expensive because that's where all the good paying jobs are. Thus if you want to solve the housing crisis, you simply need to shift the density of where these jobs are located. Personally I like the circular city model where you have several CBDs on the outer rings of the city.

The current model basically has all the good jobs in the CBD. The further you go from the CBD - the less jobs and the lower paying they are. So of course you get a housing crisis the closer you get to the CBD.

mm working in a soulless business park with no facilities has is downside compared to say central London

Berlin has no singular city center and certainly no CBD.

There aren't actually that many people who can afford Afghan Bagel. Shops catering to niche interests mostly get started because the owners overestimate their chances of success. They try to attract customers for a few months but fail to turn a profit and eventually close the shop. The landlord doesn't care, because there will always be another fool with more dreams than business sense.

In my neighborhood, all kinds of hip coffee shops and boutiques keep opening and close just as fast. The only ones who hold out for longer have been there for decades, so they're probably protected by the cap on rent increases. It also helps to be an ordinary baker rather than specializing in Afghan Bagel, because that way they can get enough customers to keep the business afloat.

You say that like moving somewhere where there are a lot of good jobs is something only snotty upperclass twits would ever want to do. This mental image justifies nimby ladder-raising by trivializing labor mobility, the massive decline of which is a huge problem. E.g. https://neighborhoodeffects.mercatus.org/2017/01/26/why-the-...

People want to live near their work so they can spend less time commuting and more time with their families. The people that successfully do this are usually highest in the food chain and push out of that area all the others lower on the food chain.

Thus cities filled with high-level management types as they're the only ones that can afford the rent and the mortgages.

To be fair, not everyone hates commuting, but many people do, thus the drive towards urbanization.

Furthermore, even if people don't mind commuting, they'd want to find a reasonably nice area to live to commute from. Those nice places get populated and overrun and people lower on the food chain get priced out; again the cycle continues.

Until all the people lowest on the food chain must commute very far distances. At some point, many of them realize that if they were to calculate the commute as unpaid work hours, that they're actually being paid way less than what they make on paper.

So now even those people lowest on the food chain move away in search for higher wage jobs with shorter commute times, and the cycle continues again and again.

The sweet spot is finding a short commute time with low-cost housing. That's truly maximizing your wage.

It's not just about being a hip urbanite.

Why did you need to vent that? How does it affect your life that people like unique specialty shops and, like literally every other human who's ever been alive, want a good value on where they live? You come off incredibly condescending writing this.

> Everyone and their cat wants to live as close as humanly possible to the hip center of the hip city.

I don't agree with this assumption. Most people just want to live reasonably close to their job, a grocery store, and maybe a few restaurants, while having enough space that they feel is sufficient. Maybe add in some constraints for feeling safe or being in a decent school district.

It's ironic how much effort is given to justifying the actual amount while the question of "who gets that cash and why do they deserve it?" gets glossed over.

It's a bit like when Russia privatised in the 90s and American economists told Russia that it really didn't who (i.e. oligarchs) owned everything provided everything is privatised.

> Everyone and their cat wants to live as close as humanly possible to the hip center of the hip city

No, people want to live near their jobs. If we build enough office s for X people and in order to find X home, you have to include places more than an hour away then you're going to fuck up housing prices.

Or make more hip city centers.

It's not something that can be planned. This is a cultural thing perpetuated by people themselves.

In most decent cities I've seen, there are: the city has several different "hip" areas, and you can easily travel between them with public transit. There isn't just one single downtown.

Berlin is still empty compared to pre WW2. There are huge empty areas right in the center of the city.

There just isn't enough building going on. Building in Germany is expensive, and complicated. Even though almost anything would improve upon this clustereff of 60's communist architecture, you can not even build a skyscraper because people don't want it.

Berlin is Berlin. Removing it from Germany would increase its GDP. Nothing makes sense here, and its a chaotic antithesis of the other large cities in Germany. Heck, they can't even finish the airport because our socialist officials just had to show they can build it themselves (they could not).

What annoys me about this sentiment is that I was never a hipster, or posh, or greedy. I got priced out from anything decent all the same, while my hipster friends got rich. People aren't flocking to cities because they are entitled, though some might be, but because there are no good alternatives in most countries.

There was a Jewish community in Afghanistan but most of them already immigrated. One thing is certain though, bagel was not part of their menu. Here are some chit chat that a youtuber did with Afghani Jews in Israel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Xq0VEwrSr8