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Comment by tsotha | Hacker News Reader

>It's pretty obvious that a lot of people want density—if they didn't, housing prices in NYC, DC, Seattle, San Francisco, and others wouldn't be so high.

You're making the assumption people want to live there because of the density and not because there are certain types of jobs that pay more in big cities. I could make twenty or thirty percent more if I moved to NYC, but that's something I'll never do.

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Not necessarily -- people may want to live there in spite of the density, since not everybody is like you in turning down a 30% salary bump to avoid the big city. But it's definitely true that dense expensive places are dense and expensive because people want to live there. The regulatory problem being pointed out is that it's borderline-illegal to increase densities almost everywhere, despite increasing prices. It is all but certain that if there were no regulatory incentives for one level of density over another that there would be a lot more density than there is now.

>But it's definitely true that dense expensive places are dense and expensive because people want to live there.

It's just as likely for every person who wants to live in a dense city there's someone else who lives there for career reasons but would rather live somewhere else. The second person drives up the cost of housing just as much as the first.

You're making the assumption people want to live there because of the density and not because there are certain types of jobs that pay more in big cities.

Glaeser's book and a lot of the other work on economic geography make it clear that the two are inherently related and evolve together; density promotes knowledge spillover effects, dense markets, and various other Good Things. See also some of Richard Florida's work (though it can be frothy at times).

Well, we're not in disagreement, then. But saying you want to do such and such a job doesn't necessarily imply you're interested in living on top of ten million other people. Everyone makes tradeoffs - for a lot of people the density is a big negative, but it's outweighed by employment opportunities.

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