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Comment by zanny | Hacker News Reader

Pretty much every western nation has systemically failed to recognize or support the insanely high demand for high density living in the 21st century. That is where the future of economics is, where the future of humanity in general pretty much is, and every democracy is consistently demonstrating the total inability for legislatures to sacrifice the advantage of those lucky enough to inhabit cities as they exist now for the benefit of all those who would grow the economy and future in the cities tomorrow. Largely because those in the cities have the money and influence to buy the politicians.

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Because the root cause is not always high demand, it’s also speculation. Real Estate is now cool again (just look at investing forums or subreddits), and foreign investor money is flowing.

Look for example at Portland (OR) how the rent increase correlates with the population increase. The current urban hype alone can not explain these numbers.

Also another example since a few years a lot of high earning people in Paris are actively moving to cities with a better quality of life and climate (like Nantes, Bordeaux), in fact as high than 80% would do it if they could [1]. Yet bizarrely this has absolutely no impact on the market.

[1] https://www.lepoint.fr/dossiers/economie/bac8-saut-secteur-p...

I would give you 10 upvotes if I could. The main reason for rent (and housing prices in general) increases is speculation and investment. There is billions of dollars in rentals and mortgages, and it's in everyone's interest that real estate worth goes up... unless you're trying to rent an apartment or buy a house.

Someone pretty smart once said you can't have both real estate as an infinitely increasing source of wealth _and_ affordable housing at the same time. You only get to pick one.

This doesn't make any sense - real estate speculation would increase the purchase price of real estate but cannot directly impact rental rates. Speculation means people are bidding up prices for real estate beyond what's supportable by current demand, based on expected future demand. This generally doesn't make sense in the rental market - as a tenant, you're not entitled to benefit from any future increase in demand and it doesn't make sense to pay more that what the rental is worth to you now. This means rents, in aggregate, are a relatively accurate measure of the current supply and demand, free of speculative intents.

Ironically, certain types of rent control laws could lead to the rental market being influenced by speculation. Rent control laws effectively turn tenants into partial owners - this means, depending on the law, it may make sense to rent at an above-market rate, if that allows you to keep renting the same unit at what would later be a below-market rate. Likewise, from the landlord's perspective, it may not make sense to rent even at a market rate, because to do so may lock you out of getting what would be a higher market rate in the future.

> This doesn't make any sense - real estate speculation would increase the purchase price of real estate but cannot directly impact rental rates.

Not an expert, but seems to me they could indirectly, by reducing supply of rentable apartments:

Consider district X with n rentable apartments located in m buildings.

Now some buildings get vacated and are kept empty by speculators.

The apartments from those houses are not anymore available for rent, however, the demand for rentable apartments stays the same - therefore landlords of the remaining apartments now have leeway to raise rent without being punished by the market.

This doesn't have much to do with speculation - the decision to rent or not is something that every owner can make and the economics of the decision don't depend on whether your investment was based on price speculation.

Generally speaking, wherever you have a strong rental market, vacancy is low - it doesn't make sense to keep units vacant in a strong rental market. Speculators aren't some magical creatures to whom normal rules don't apply - real estate speculators are merely investors who believe that prices will move in their favor in the future. That doesn't mean they are any more incentivized to forego rental income, which generally is a large component of the return on any real estate investment.

Edit: I'll add that if you go by classical economics, you'd predict rent to go down if price speculation is excessive, since builders respond to real estate price and if price is sufficiently above cost of construction, this leads to construction of more units, which increases supply and depresses rent.

My general understanding is that this doesn't necessarily work that way because the fundamental factors behind what makes a location attractive don't change - within reason, if you build more, in the long run, you just become a larger, denser version of what you were, which just attracts more people.

Agreed. I'm still shocked about how pervasive it is. New York, San Francisco, Denver, Austin, Vancouver, Montreal, London, Paris, Berlin, Warsaw. It seems like a complete binary: cities are either dying or in the midst of a "housing crisis".

>Pretty much every western nation has systemically failed to recognize or support the insanely high demand for high density living in the 21st century.

While I agree that we have an unsolved problem here, isn't a city's government mainly responsible to do good by the people who inhabit that city and make up its electorate? That's how western democracies work, so no surprises there.

I know of many people all over the world who would like to move to the US and still the 'insanely high demand' has not been supported.

It's so strange - the promise of the "information super-highway" in the 90s was that proximity wouldn't matter as much. But if anything it matters more, since every minute spent idle (e.g. travelling to meet someone) has a higher associated cost due to the opportunity cost of lost productivity. So we tend to clump and cluster.

> But if anything it matters more, since every minute spent idle (e.g. travelling to meet someone) has a higher associated cost due to the opportunity cost of lost productivity.

Which sounds like another vote for remote work instead of clumping and clustering. Why care about proximity and the time it takes to travel when everyone you'd want to meet, regardless of location, is a message, call or video conference away and reachable from your home, favorite coffee shop or local office?

And no, I'm not saying that this has to replace all face to face interaction, but I think it should become the default for work environments that are compatible with this approach.

I totally agree. I'm just trying to get my head around why it seems that our promised decentralisation never came to be. Maybe old habits just die hard.

It is decentralized, just family rather than work.

Speaking as a German, a big part of why this decentralization isn't happening is that Germany's internet infrastructure is a fucking joke. I'm sometimes even having trouble with getting consistent 3G coverage in large city centers. When driving around the countryside, it's frequently 2G or no service at all. And it's looking similarly bad for broadband internet access in homes. My parents don't have any broadband service whatsoever. They use a 4G hotspot to go online, and get an average connection speed of 170 KB/s. This is par for the course in rural Germany.

As a fellow german, I'm aware. In fact I'm living in a quiet, rural place about 45 minutes from a very large city. My only broadband option is LTE, which thankfully has very good coverage here (steady 50 Mbit) and features an unlimited plan (Telekom Magenta Hybrid), but up until a few years ago everyone around here was limited to 1 Mbit DSL.

Of course the problem goes deeper than raw infrastructure - the mindset for a digital life isn't there yet. This appleis to businesses and particularly to official government bodies. Think about your interactions with the government, simple errands like renewing your ID or registering your car - there are awfully complicated and outdated processes everywhere. I've said it before but I look with envy to competent, easy to navigate portals like https://www.gov.uk/.

I don't buy any of this. Growing up everyone around me saw the city as somewhere you begrudgingly went out of necessity and only lived there if you had no choice, and I'm inclined to agree. In virtually every aspect I find more countryside-ish living much more pleasant.

Consider virtual reality and remote work. I imagine much of the workforce will move to virtual offices in the near to medium-far future when corporations finally come around to realizing they don't have to waste so much money on rent. There's no need for programmers, graphic designers, reporters, and employees of lots of other professions to work in a physical office. So really, as cities become less of a necessity to certain jobs, I expect a moderate exodus to nicer areas, halting growth or even decreasing population in urban centers.

>Growing up everyone around me saw the city as somewhere you begrudgingly went out of necessity and only lived there if you had no choice

I assume you grew up in the United States?

Cause European cities are so much better? They're not. Overcrowded, overpriced, just for jobs and getting out asap.

Yes, upstate NY.

Where? I ran screaming from the Albany area first thing I could when I turned 18.

Hudson Valley, somewhere around Hyde Park. I went over some of the features of the area here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20218742

What's so bad about the Albany area? I haven't been there since I went as a kid for some medical facility.

>Consider virtual reality and remote work. I imagine much of the workforce will move to virtual offices in the near to medium-far future when corporations finally come around to realizing they don't have to waste so much money on rent. There's no need for programmers, graphic designers, reporters, and employees of lots of other professions to work in a physical office. So really, as cities become less of a necessity to certain jobs, I expect a moderate exodus to nicer areas, halting growth or even decreasing population in urban centers.

People have been saying this for decades. Personally, I'd like nothing more than for it to be true so that I can ditch my expensive Silicon Valley apartment. But it's not. Lately I've even been seeing a lot of pushback from people who feel more productive in an office setting and don't want to work remotely.

Unfortunately everything points to the effect being the opposite. Remote means you don't have to be in Detroit, but can contract a factory in China from New York or run a data center anywhere from the Bay Area.

Depends on what you want, I suppose. High density humanity simply makes practical and economically viable gatherings, grouping and other activities that just don't work in low-density populations. Classes, meetups, specialist stores, hobbies, clubs, shows, lectures, institutions and just plain bubbling, embryonic interactions; all of it an order of magnitude more intense in a big city. Travel even fifty miles away from a big city and suddenly so much opportunity vanishes, or necessitates a two hour round trip into the city to take advantage of. For the people who want these things, the city is the only option. I don't work in a city because that's where my job is; I work in (the outskirts of) a city because that's where everything else I want is.

I work with people who live in the inner city and commute outwards daily for their job, because their job is just a way to pay for what they actually want, and what they actually want is to be in that city.

15 miles, 2 hours? Hmmm, maybe invest in New roads.

But city living is sad, yeah you can have all the social fun, but none of the quiet, peace, living and hobby space.

I like living 10 miles from the city, lots of space, quiet and green, can drive 20 minutes to the shity anytime.

15 miles, 2 hours? Hmmm, maybe invest in New roads.

Maybe invest in new glasses. I didn't say 15.

A city that has a boundary defined enough that you can reasonably say you live ten miles from it, and that you can drive into in 20 minutes? You're thinking of a town.

Almost all that stuff exists just fine outside major cities in my experience. I went over some of the great stuff around where I'm from in NY here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20218742

Yeah, living in the suburbs of or reasonably close to a large metropolis is where it's at. As soon as you want/need a good or service that goes even slightly outside of the local mainstream, it will almost always be available only in a big city. The bigger the more likely that it will be available.

That's sort of the opposite of my experience, where everyone couldn't wait to get out of the stultifying small town, where there was no work and no future.

That's odd because it it's pretty much the polar opposite of what I've experienced.

Everyone wants to move to the big cities, especially Berlin, as they provide culture and a sense of freedom. You are able to meet like-minded people and are able to experience culture and infrastructure that simply does not exist in rural areas.

This of course makes makes the situation for the villages worse as many young people move away. Who's left are old people and those who are not qualified to find work or education elsewhere.

The population decline in those regions also means a decline in infrastructure, economy and cultural events, which makes those regions even more unattractive, perpetuating the cycle.

There is a slight trend of dropouts creating alternative living communities in those areas as abandoned houses & property can be had for very cheap. But their isolated nature means that often they will not last as their inhabitants move back to the city were their original peer group is.

Young people want to go to Berlin but people with money want to settle away from it.

And IMO that's also a product of rent freezing.

Without rent freezing, rents continue to increase substantially enough that investors either build more housing in/near the urban centers to meet demand OR the price shifts high enough to make the decisions to live in rural areas much more appealing.

The problem with cities is that they have really bad failure modes. Consider Baltimore. The city has been run by a single political party for decades, and run right into the ground. Notice the trend in these population stats:

https://www.biggestuscities.com/city/baltimore-maryland

This is a city right next to DC, in an essentially recession proof area with lots of jobs.

I've known a number of people who were big proponents of living in cities until either (a) they were robbed, or (b) they had kids and realized there was no decent school there, and (c) they had no chance of impacting the government in any way to affect change. They all ended up moving to the burbs.

Are robberies less common in the suburbs?

Are schools in the suburbs better than those in the city?

Why is it easier to affect government in suburbs?

I'm not sure if you're discussing Baltimore in particular or if you are making these points generally. I'm not sure on robberies, but I live in Sydney and I don't think there is a big gap between school quality and government participation in suburbs vs cities.

My experience has been yes to all three of those. I’ve lived for decades in both Orange County (suburbs) and Los Angeles (city).

Where I grew up it was the exact opposite. I lived in a small suburbanish town which was 50% college students and 50% retirees. Almost all of my friends and fellow graduates left for the larger cities where job opportunities were far more abundant and where there was generally a lot more to do and see.

Which also seems to be supported by the general population trends. Rural cities are dying, with the younger generations moving closer to urban centers. Remote work and virtual offices will give you a better choice of city, but people are not likely to move out to places where there's nothing to do, terrible infrastructure and less opportunity in the scenario where you choose to find a new job.

And people have been saying that remote work will cause the trends to reverse any day now. So far that hasn't stopped companies even in SV; instead they just build new offices in other cities.

What do you mean by "nothing to do"? What is there to do only in the city that's supposed to be so attractive, clubs, modern art galleries? I'm genuinely curious because this never resonated with me.

Things to do in the Hudson Valley, the example I have in mind of a non-city area: expansive hiking trails for walking/biking, a river for rafting/skiing/boating/fishing, great family-owned restaurants all over, lots of nice historic sites such as the FDR estate and Vanderbelt mansion, a drive-in (unfortunately a rare institution these days, and obviously there are tons of normal movie theaters around), lots of good thrift/antique stores, hunting, tasting the fresh cider/whatever from local orchards (and getting great meat/produce from farmer's markets along with that), some concert halls around that play orchestras, horseback riding. If you want some stuff like classic theater/art galleries/etc you can find those around too, and a lot of stuff done by colleges. I'm sure I've missed a lot but this should be enough to make my point.

The city has some good stuff like the Museum of Natural History but not enough for me to want to live there.

I think you are missing the kinds of things that city people consider important. For instance, can you walk from your house to the market, and to the theater, and to the hiking trails? I live in an dense city in Asia and I can do this.

Many city dwellers do not drive a car and a significant proportion of those never even learned how. Does your rural area support a dockless shared bike scheme? Can teenagers travel independently or do they need to rely on their parents to drive them around? How much carbon does it cost the average family to get groceries?

On entertainment, and specifically in relation to Berlin: do you have a clubbing scene? Where can people go to dance to electronic music? Can they go out Saturday night after 9pm? Is there still public transport to take them home in the wee hours?

I live alone and everything I own fits in a backpack. Are there single room apartments available for people who choose to live minimal lifestyles? Is it even possible for people to rent? If not, how far away is the trailer park from the cultural center? And how close is that to the nearest Greyhound stop?

Things like walkability, access to rental accommodation, 24 hour entertainment and services... These kinds of things are taken for granted by people who live in cities. Of course this kind of lifestyle is not for everyone, but for those that value it, rural and suburban areas do not even come close.

Most people including me don't mind having to drive places, but there actually are a lot of places where you can walk to businesses if you live there. I'd rather have a more private house surrounded by forest on all sides.

You don't need a bikeshare if you have space to store your own bike. Teenagers can get a license at 16, ride bikes around, walk around, use skateboards, lots of options, but I don't see the big deal about getting rides from their parents sometimes. I don't think carbon use of individuals is much of a concern, with mpg getting better all the time and electric vehicles getting more popular.

I don't know anything about clubbing scenes but there probably are some. There are small cities like Poughkeepsie interspersed with the more suburban and rural areas around there. Quick google search shows some nightclubs exist. I could ask you about the availability of a bunch of things the city might lack too like places like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minnewaska_State_Park_Preserve

Maybe there are single room apartments around, I haven't checked, but there are definitely some small ones with a few rooms that probably cost a lot less than a single-room in a city anyway. Yes it's possible to rent, do you really think people don't rent outside the city? Honestly I think it's a problem, too much real estate is snatched up by people who then rent it out, making homeownership less available.

What do you mean by cultural center? There are bus stops around of various degrees of private or subsidized, with routes either within the city areas of Poughkeepsie etc or farther-reaching.

24 hour services are less than a city but they're still there. Wal Mart, Dunkin Donuts, various liquor stores, lots of stuff is 24 hours out there.

I have lived and traveled a lot outside of the city, in North America, Australia and Europe. Trust me when I say the vast majority of rural areas do not have public transport that is remotely comparable to what people enjoy in large cities. I am talking buses, trains, bikes, scooters, all available within a few minutes to take you anywhere you want to go. There is a whole expanse of North America - notably west of the Missouri - where you can't even get into or out of the small towns because Greyhound doesn't run there any more and Amtrak never did.

I have lived in the country. I don't want that lifestyle. Billions of people around the world do not want that lifestyle. They do not want to own a car. They do not want to own a bicycle. They do not want to own a house. They do not want to maintain a garden or have a forest on all sides. They do not want to go to the one nightclub for miles around. They want to have bars and restaurants and theaters and all those things that you are lucky enough to have in upstate New York, but they want it 5 minutes walk from their front door. And they want to choose from 20 different options. They want to get vegan food or bubble tea or something a little more interesting than Dunkin Donuts at 2am.

I understand that there are people who really appreciate the rural lifestyle, but please also understand there are many people who do not.

That's fine if it works for you. The point here is there's lots to do outside the city, even a lot of exclusive activities. I'm tired of seeing it said that there's "nothing to do" outside the city. Maybe if your only hobbies are nightclubs and getting mugged.

Besides that, people who would prefer to not own any car, rent bicycles instead of owning them if they're a bicyclist, and wouldn't want to own a house if they had the option sound like a niche minority to me.

> Maybe if your only hobbies are nightclubs and getting mugged.

As someone living in and enjoying rural live with lots of space and quiet I really understand your point, but slightly belittling and disregarding comments like these don't help your argument. It's not that hard to see the attraction of big cities as long as you can imagine that someone might have different interests than you. Of course, this applies to city dwellers unable to see the appeal of rural life as well.

> Besides that, people who would prefer to not own any car, rent bicycles instead of owning them if they're a bicyclist, and wouldn't want to own a house if they had the option sound like a niche minority to me.

I wouldn't put the idea of not owning a car in the same category as your other examples. A car is the first thing I'd get rid of if it wasn't required and I have no doubt that a large and increasing number of people feel the same way.

I don't think most people would choose not to own a car if there wasn't a concern of money involved. Car ownership can certainly be less economical than sticking to transit/biking in some areas, but I think most people in such situations would still hypothetically prefer having the option of driving available.

I don't own a car, nor do I ever intend to do so. Cars are expensive, dangerous and overall something I've never needed to get around.

This means almost all of the rural areas in America are off-limits for me, because not only is the public transportation infrastructure abysmal but it also heavily restricts my options if I wanted to get food, travel or do any form of recreation.

Whenever people bring up living in areas far outside of the city, they never factor in car ownership as part of the equation because they assume that's just a given.

Car ownership is not just a given. Instead of owning a car, you could lease a pick-up truck. That would get you around pretty well, especially if you get one with AWD. Fill the back with cooking gear so you can have food. If you want to be real cheap about that, route the exhaust up into a smoker so that the truck heats your food as you drive.

> Billions of people around the world do not want that lifestyle. They do not want to own a car. They do not want to own a bicycle. They do not want to own a house [...] they want it 5 minutes walk from their front door. [...]

You're assuming that essentially the entire world ("billions of people around the world") thinks as you do, just because you think so.

I've lived in cities of different sizes (magnitudes of 10⁴ to 10⁶), and those who don't want any personal mean of transport, not even a bike ("They do not want to own a car. They do not want to own a bicycle."), are a tiny minority.

I guess you must be in your 20s/early 30s, since something that actually happens IRL is that when people start to have children, instead of moving to more dense locations, which are more convient according to the theory you expose, move to more sparse locations (towards the suburbs), which actually require a personal mean of transport (of course, this is part of a variety of reasons).

That all sounds like college, with dorms and a campus shuttle and so on.

IMHO, one is expected to grow out of that. The next phase of life awaits.

Much later, when you are widowed and you move into an assisted living facility, you can once again have high-density living with few belongings and a shared means of transportation.

> IMHO, one is expected to grow out of that. The next phase of life awaits.

As rural living reminds me of elementary school, the same could be said for rural living.

> I don't buy any of this. Growing up everyone around me saw the city as somewhere you begrudgingly went out of necessity and only lived there if you had no choice, and I'm inclined to agree. In virtually every aspect I find more countryside-ish living much more pleasant.

I don't buy any of this. Growing up, everyone around me saw the suburbs as somewhere you begrudgingly went out of necessity and only lived there if you had no choice, and I'm inclined to agree. In virtually every aspect I find more urban living much more pleasant.

Funny how that works.

I'm always wondering... Where do those city dwellers put their heavy machinery? What? You don't have heavy machinery? Well, no hardware projects for you then. Do people seriously lift a half a ton lathe to the 10th floor of their apartment building and then just go at it?

My (small by international standards) city has several locations where you pay a monthly fee to use a shared workshop.

He wasn't talking about suburbs which technically are a part of a city and not of the countryside.

Suburban and rural can be blurry. I'm not sure what I'd call some of the areas I grew up around where there are both farms/orchards and a lot of cul-de-sacs/other houses. When it comes to that odd pattern of development where there are a bunch of cookie cutter houses really close together with little yards, I'm not a fan of that.

I've heard this change (the definite shift in desirability from suburbs and small towns to cities, which admittedly you seem to have somewhat blinkered out) attributed to the vast improvements in air quality / waste management / crime / public transport in cities, and that explanation seems reasonable to me.

Country living can be great, but your experience some number of years ago doesn't speak to the current data.

I was living in Berlin in 2015/2016 and believe me in no way at all are people coming here begrudgingly. Pretty much everyone between 20 and 35 wants to live here. And I can't blame them. I wanted to go and I still love the city to bits. There is nothing you can't to there. Tons of very interesting people to collaborate on projects with. Extremely good food and cultural attractions. Pretty much the most progressive place I've ever come across. Easily the best nightlife in the world.

This sounds like a love letter I suppose and I realize you were talking about cities in general. But anyway, I can understand why everyone wants go there.

> Pretty much everyone between 20 and 35 wants to live here.

Well, since you were in Berlin, that's probably survivorship bias. I live in Dresden, a city of 500k inhabitants about 200km south of Berlin. To me, Dresden is just the right size. Not as vast as Berlin, where it can easily take over one hour to get to the other side for a meetup, but still large enough to have enough interesting stuff going on in it.

> that's probably survivorship bias.

What? Is every other Berliner dead and can't tell their story?

Survivorship bias can apply to things other than literal survivors.

What I mean is that, since they're in Berlin, they're mostly interacting with other people who live in Berlin. They're not going to hear from people who don't want to live in Berlin, even if those exist.

Yes and no. Yes your want to make an offer to those arriving, but you also don't want to destroy a city by letting prices go so high that only a certain caste of people is able to afford it - think SF. Not everyone can be rich enough to afford decent living inside a city. And yet you still want cheap burgers and services, as well as public schools and trash collection and police. None of those can afford big city living if you allow the tech & big business crowd to simply price them out of the market.

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