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Comment by seanmcdirmid | Hacker News Reader

> The real problem as always is zoning.

If the real problem was always zoning, wouldn't dense cities like NYC and Shanghai be cheaper than average, not way over average?

> Check out Japan housing CPI - a market where supply meets demand thanks to federal zoning rules, and is also centrally banked.

Japan went through a huge bubble in the 1980s. Also, housing (the structures at least) rapidly depreciates in Japan, which prevents them from being used a speculative asset as in countries (even then they still went through a huge bubble in the 80s). It is definitely an alternative model to our own, but I'm not sure how many people will want to experiment with that. Japan also much more strictly restricts immigration than other countries, which makes it, for example, a bad place for Wenzhou house wife real estate speculation.

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> If the real problem was always zoning, wouldn't dense cities like NYC and Shanghai be cheaper than average, not way over average?

It's not about supply by itself, it's supply vs demand.

Big cities have big populations and economies, which means a lot of demand.

But as far as zoning goes, note that like other metros, NYC has actually effectively downzoned areas over time; in fact, a huge proportion of buildings there would now be illegal due to different types of density restrictions: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/05/19/upshot/forty-...

A lot of NIMBY's tend to go, "well, there's still some areas where it's possible to build more, so there's no real issue there". This is approximately like restricting car manufacturing to one state, and then when car prices go through the roof, saying "well, there's still more land to build car factories there, so I don't see the problem, it couldn't possibly be this rule".

It’s wild that manhattans population was ~2.5 million in 1910 and is now only ~1.6 million.

Doesn't it make sense though? In 1910, manhattan was expensive but a lot of people still lived/worked there. The apartments would be crazily subdivided so you could fit 10 people into a 3 or even 2 bedroom. Now they are all owned by wallstreet bankers with small families, and they spend much of their time somewhere else (they might not even list their manhattan apartment as their "main domicile" during the census).

yeah, the two big changes are

* multigenerational to nuclear households

* decline in number of kids

This pattern of living is still common to a lesser degree in outer-borough immigrant neighborhoods, which is why they were so hard hit during NYC's massive COVID wave.

Demand for Manhattan apartments is crazy high, it's just illegal for taller ones to be built to meet demand most of the time.

People think Manhattan is mostly skyscrapers, but the reality is very different. Only a small portion of the land has high rises on it, just glance at Google Maps with 3D view on.

Manhattan is mostly multi level apartment buildings, at least 4 stories or so. I don't know why your point would contradict mine. Yes, units in the taller skyscrapers are more expensive and sell for tens of millions of dollars, if not more.

I wonder how NYC would do with cheap 30 story Chinese concrete apartment blocks? (30 stories, because any taller requires steel, at least with construction practices that use cheap migrant labor).

NYC housing has pushed outwards into Queens and the Bronx, manhattan is less populated these days because it lacks full time residents (the apartments are still sold, but their owners list upstate/Connecticut/long island properties as their permanent addresses, and they have many less occupants in them even when full, not like the turn of the century when more than a few people were crammed into small apartments).

> A lot of NIMBY's tend to go, "well, there's still some areas where it's possible to build more, so there's no real issue there". This is approximately like restricting car manufacturing to one state, and then when car prices go through the roof, saying "well, there's still more land to build car factories there, so I don't see the problem, it couldn't possibly be this rule".

My only point was that making cities more dense seems to make them more desirable, causing more people to want to live there. Yes density is a great thing! But it doesn't solve affordability problems on its own. Can you imagine if San Francisco (6.2k/sqm) had NYC-level density (27k/sqm), would it be more or less affordable? I'm going to go with the less.

What is really holding us back are the American libertarians who are afraid of a public housing system like the one in Singapore.

> My only point was that making cities more dense seems to make them more desirable, causing more people to want to live there.

Increasing housing in this manner would probably boost land prices, but over a greater number of units, so result in overall decrease in housing cost.

NYC is a bit of a weird spot in real estate, in that having a Manhattan address (and probably a Williamsburg or Bushwick address to a lesser degree these days) is a status symbol for foreigners, in the same way that London or Paris might be. Most American cities do not have this kind of cachet and so at some point prices will fall if you build enough.

The problem is really that housing production would have to increase by an incredible amount to get to affordable. To use the example of Tokyo as affordable, let's look at comparative housing production statistics.

* The 23 special wards of Tokyo, 8.9M people, built 110,000 new homes that year.

* The entire country of England, population 53M, built 115,000 homes a year.

* The metropolitan area of NY, population 20.3M, approved 27,000 units in 2012, but approvals != actual construction.

https://nextcity.org/urbanist-news/entry/tokyo-housing-high-...

> * The 23 special wards of Tokyo, 8.9M people, built 110,000 new homes that year.

Since housing is refreshed in Japan on a 20-30 year basis, you can't quote the number of housing built without comparing it to the number of housing torn down (since, as mentioned before, housing depreciates).

> * The metropolitan area of NY, population 20.3M, approved 27,000 units in 2012, but approvals != actual construction.

Do you mean no housing was built in 2012?

So the way it works in NY IIRC, you can get an approval and not actually act on it, and the reason you can do this is because the approval can be sold with the property, which isn't an uncommon thing.

NYC does not track construction starts like that, or at least not when that article was written

Demand isn't unlimited, and you have the causation mostly backwards. Cities being successful causes people to flock to them, which means there's demand for density.

The problem is that it isn't just those on the right opposed to density -- the left is little better. Sure, progressives are largely okay with what density already exists, but propose upzoning and they flip out. Just look at the California state legislature, or major west coast cities.

Demand is pseudo unlimited. The real problem is betting on a single location. All 300 million Americans won't fit into new york. Why not build more new yorks?

New York became a hub for commerce and culture because it was a very successful port city. With the completion of the Erie canal, it connected the American heartland to the Atlantic Ocean. This naturally led to it being the main port for immigration as large numbers of people came to the US in search of economic opportunity. Decades of sitting at the center of the northeast corridor, the richest metropolitan area in human history, has made it a solid contender for the financial capital of the world. You can't simply build more New Yorks, the geography and history that produced it are unique.

Of course not everyone wants to live in New York, indeed there are many cities that each have their own unique circumstances drawing vast numbers of people, and all of them experience great demand. But there's a reason you can't just through up a bunch of skyscrapers in South Dakota and get everyone to move there.

Libertarians have effectively zero say in US politics generally. They have blogs. Trump and Bush Jnr couldn't care less about Libertarians.

However, the place with the lack of Zoning rules that appeals most to Libertarians, Houston, is doing pretty well.

Houston has seen an increase in population from 3.8M in 2000 to 6.4 M in 2020 and has a median house price of $285K.

https://www.macrotrends.net/cities/23014/houston/population

https://www.redfin.com/city/8903/TX/Houston/housing-market

> Libertarians have effectively zero say in US politics generally.

The Republican party is inundated with Libertarian philosophy. Even the Democratic party is often forced to go along.

> Houston has seen an increase in population from 3.8M in 2000 to 6.4 M in 2020 and has a median house price of $285K.

Yes, Houston is probably the best example of a libertarian city in the world. Most of us don't want to live there, but someone obviously does.

The irony is that Singapore has a public housing fix to their problem, but is also often touted as being a very economic libertarian city state.

> My only point was that making cities more dense seems to make them more desirable

You have it backwards, it is making the spot desirable that leads to them becoming dense. More people keep moving in, you build denser to accommodate them. Can you imagine how expensive NYC would become if 77% of current residences suddenly stopped being unavailable?

Yes, you will have some non-linear effects, people do want to live in big cities where the action is, but the reason those cities exist in the first place is because the action's already there. New York is a massive hub of commerce and culture which is ultimately a consequence of it's position as a major port. You won't make it undesirable by decreasing density so long as its still the center of the financial world.

> Can you imagine if San Francisco (6.2k/sqm)

I'm pretty sure this is wrong. Yes, it's the first answer that comes up if you Google this stat, but this is off by a factor of 3 or so. Before the pandemic San Francisco had a density of around 18K/sqm. Although a lot of people left SF during the pandemic, 6.2k/sqm is still way to low.

Now, that we have that out of the way. In general, I agree with you. Most cities that have a high population density are expensive places to live. It's a good thing to allow cities to accommodate more people, but those places will still have a high cost of living, because many people still want to live there.

Zoning is also an issue in NYC. The suburbs are unable to become dense do to zoning which causes the prices to go up.

Brooklyn increases the density steadily. I see a lot of construction around me, mostly higher-density replacing low-density, but it's relatively slow.

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