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Comment by dominotw | Hacker News Reader

Wouldn't the world simply increase population where this is still the case even if we build more housing though?

Tends to go the other way. Fertility is strongly negatively correlated with development, of which housing is a component. America's birth rate is already well below replacement (1.8 births per woman), and relies heavily on immigration to maintain a steady population. There's a stark graph of page "4074" (page 4, figure 1-E in the PDF) of fertility rate vs HDI. [1] I bet if you build more housing you'd have fewer kids still. It's in a way counterintuitive, but very pronounced and well-studied.

[1] http://ijp.mums.ac.ir/article_7680_7828694c3909aa70d156fb9c8...

> Fertility is strongly negatively correlated with development, of which housing is a component. America's birth rate is already well below replacement

Wouldn't this imply america already has affordable housing ? Why are there endless articles in news that this isn't the case.

HDI is a composite score of which housing is an element. It includes all sorts of things like access to water, access to health care, etc, etc. I'm suggesting that continuing to develop the US through the addition of housing units would likely not lead to an increase in population but rather a decrease as tends to happen with development more broadly. I'm unaware of any studies which correlate specifically housing with fertility in isolation.

Maybe I confused you with two definitions of "development" in the same context -- developing houses, and human development / HDI of which housing is diffuse factor. See [1] for more info if you're curious.

[1] http://hdr.undp.org/en/content/human-development-index-hdi

> develop the US through the addition of housing units would likely not lead to an increase in population but rather a decrease as tends to happen with development more broadly.

That doesn't logically compute though.

Decrease in population is correlated with housing shortage in US.

Only conclusions we can draw from this is,

1. Housing is irrelevant to population growth

2. Decreasing housing will lead to further population shrinking.

3. Housing has unknown effects on population growth. In which case it can go either way.

I don't see how you it can lead to your conclusion.

Because most journalist jobs and thus journalists are in over demanded hip cities, instead of random rural flyover country, and thus write what they know.

> Wouldn't this imply america already has affordable housing ?

America has plenty of affordable housing, but it's in places that are not experiencing significant economic and population growth.

The affordable housing crisis, as defined by a high price to income ratio, is specifically occurring in areas with growing economies and populations [1]. There are many reasons for this, but the biggest is simply the recent large scale internal migration to the booming metros.

1. https://www.jchs.harvard.edu/blog/price-to-income-ratios-are...

I don't think I've ever been linked to a site in Iran before. Odd.

So your argument is to build less housing and force people to be homeless so they don't have kids?

Yea I don’t understand how urban activists can claim “induced demand” when discussing road supply but joy housing supply. There’s no obligation for any town or city to keep growing and accommodate continued population increases. That doesn’t serve the incumbent population, which is why those populations have chosen to enact zoning laws in the first place.

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