It's amazing to me how resistant people are to the idea that housing is expensive because there aren't enough homes for people to live in. It's always a search for exotic explanations like foreign buyers and mysterious empty apartments.
I imagine there are enough homes in both America and Canada (they are two of the largest countries after all). But it's all about location. Very few can even afford to move out to the middle of nowhere just to own land. And not many people that can are willing to turn their potentially short commute to work into a 90+ minute trek everyday.
Even with an increase in work from home, there's the whole entertainment aspect of living in the city that makes it a hard sell. When I mean middle of nowhere, I mean a small "town" whose businesses amount to a liquor store, some off brand shopping market, a burger joint, and a 20 year outdated public library. Anything else you need is in the suburbs 30 miles out, and Downtown will be another 30-40 after that.
You will quickly bore of any ventures in town and seek a drive to the city where there's actual events going on. If you're a recluse you can make it work, but I can understand millenial aged people not jiving with that style
But that's difficult because cities have all these veto points. It takes forever to get new construction going, right? Exactly. That's why we aren't building enough, because in the current regulatory environment we can't. That's what people talk about when they talk about NIMBYism as the cause of the housing crisis.
The not so radical solution is to make it easier to build new homes where people want to live.
The jobs left quickly enough that our physical infrastructure couldn't keep up. That implies that jobs are more fluid than building and that therefore that's probably the easier approach to getting jobs and housing in balance.
Increasing density in places that are already built up is much harder. You have to remove the people and things that are already there. If you do something wrong, there are many people in the area who can be negatively affected.
Building permitting regulations are written using the ashes of fires that started from a single house and burned down an entire city.
And often the density of “rural” areas is comparable to the big cities as even in rural areas most of the population is in small cities.
I'm not going to pretend there isn't some literal gatekeeping going on here that make this more difficult than necessary. But I'm also not exactly surprised that in cities as already densely packed as Los Angeles that there aren't exactly acres or hectacres of land just sitting around to be built "where people want to live". That's how we ended up with tiny studio apartments everywhere that still cost way too much.
Part of it is simply physical limitation. Land (unlike so many arbiturary policies nowadays) is a finite resource. Made more finite when the pareto principle kicks in.
I live in Manhattan. LA is far from densely packed.
It’s idiotically packed, seemingly to maximise time spent in traffic and minimise the number of bars, restaurants and essentials within walking distance of the average resident. But visit Tokyo or Paris if you want to see true density.
Depends on what you consider "LA". the "LA county" that extends from Lancaster to Long Beach (some 90 sq Mi) is extremely sparse. But good luck convincing someone doing business downtown to go all the way out to Lancaster to buy homes.
The "City of Los Angeles" that makes up the 10 square miles of Downtown and some immediately surrounding suburbs is densely packed IMO. There's not exactly acres of fields waiting to be tilled for living quarters, and it's not like there already isn't skyscrapers of studio apartments to reside in (that ofc is still way too expensive).
Maybe not to NY levels, but it's not a competition and I don't see that as a positive personally. especially when we can both admit which city has superior public transportation. I avoid driving downtown at all costs, but there's not really any good alternatives when I do need to do business there.
I question which issue between the two of land and transportation would take longer to resolve. I feel they've both been mutli-decade crusades at this point.
Also, https://noparkinghere.com/
And I wonder how much space is lawns
But there are acres and acres of single family homes in both urban areas that could become mid rise apartments.
The developing world has even denser examples [1], e.g. the #2 entry of Manila is about twice as dense as Paris.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_world_cities_by_popula...
2. They make more land all the time. Look at a map of Boston in 1800. In fact, look at an old map of almost any city near a large body of water and compare it to today and you'll find a lot more land being used.
At a great environmental cost. Thankfully society is a bit more careful about environment destruction than in the days where all garbage was dumped on the shoreline to create landfill and build on it.
https://estuarypress.com/hrma-photo-post/filling-the-san-fra...
https://priceonomics.com/what-parts-of-san-francisco-are-bui...
It is true that many cities have filled in shorelines to create more buildable/usable surface.
It is not true that cities do this all the time.
You mean, if we had the density of Manhattan or Shanghai, our housing would be as cheap as Manhattan or Shanghai? I'm not sure people would like that (given that those places are more expensive in general). The best example in the states is Houston, but it is horrible sprawl (so housing isn't being built exactly where people want to live, but continues to build outward). Tokyo is the best example internationally, but they have special conditions (housing depreciates since second-hand houses are not popular, decreasing population, liberal definitions on what is needed to call something a home).
But yes, the implication of a housing abundance agenda is that places will change. I think it's generally underrated exactly how much the cities we know today changed during the 20th century as they grew in population.
That said, you don't really need a lot of high rises to drastically increase density. Even row houses and low rise apartments make a pretty large difference and would be more than enough to meet demand for most cities that are experiencing a crunch.
I would think it might to some degree, but there would be several cut-off points, as living conditions change with more density, and people who previously wanted to move to a place might not like how a place changes as density increases.
With a highway, you can add as many lanes as you want, and the experience of driving on it isn't changed much.
Yes, plenty of people are discouraged from moving to a hot city due to the lack of supply. Increasing supply then moves discouraged demand into actual demand. Otherwise why do dense cities (like Shanghai, NYC, Manila) still experience housing shortages?
If the place is desirable, demand increases to catch up to the new supply, bringing us to the same place where we are now. Even if we built a lot of housing in a desirable place, enough that we hit a cut-off point: in a hundred years or so, we might have just had more children to soak up that supply (like what happens with agriculture surplus). Things go until an equilibrium is reached (where prices are high enough that demand is discouraged, or the place becomes undesirable to really reduce demand).
It's possible (and likely) that housing in Shanghai, NYC, and Manila just have not reached a supply-demand equilibrium yet, because housing policy still constrains supply. There's nothing requires that demand is effectively infinite in these cities, or that demand will keep growing as more housing is built.
Let's say unfilled demand for housing in San Francisco sits at 100,000 units right now (making up numbers; they don't matter). If we could magically build those 100,000 units tomorrow, yes, I do expect we will induce some more demand, because home/rent prices will drop. So let's say we build another 100,000 units. Maybe we get some more demand, because home/rent prices drop more. So we do it again, but not forever.
Because my feeling here is that the main driver of more demand in SF would be drops in home/rent prices. Those prices can't drop to zero; they will always have a cost, and it seems unlikely to me that the cost will drop low enough -- no matter how many units are built, within the physical constraints of the space -- such that there will still always be unmet demand. And home prices will still always be propped up by housing policy to some extent; the city would never implement unrestricted housing development with no hurdles. But maybe the "equilibrium" price can be something significantly less ridiculous than it is today.
Equilibriums are not hypothetical. The fact that increasing supply can induce more demand is well known in many areas (expressways being just one). Cities take off, and building booms don't reduce prices like a recession or bust will.
> the city would never implement unrestricted housing development with no hurdles.
Not many people would like to live in such a city (who wants to live in Houston?), so that on its own would limit demand.
> But maybe the "equilibrium" price can be something significantly less ridiculous than it is today.
Sure. Perhaps a lot more WFH will eventually eliminate or reduce critical mass feedback loops that lead to these problems in the first place (e.g. why live in Seattle when you can live in Toledo?).
5 stories. Perfect height.
* Let everyone shop at the couple of good supermarkets and hope the supermarket can keep the shelves stocked and deal with the crowds.
* Get those other supermarkets to start stocking stuff other than sardines.
The right answer is probably a blend of those.
Which further creates a spiraling effect where even recluses will feel obligated to move to the city just for anything that you can't / is very difficult to get from a town. Turns out it isn't that fun when the majority of your neighborhood doesn't share your generation or interests. Especially for young people still looking to find someone to settle down with.
The NIMBY housing policies and restrictions on building new housing are a massive part of sprawl, and with it the huge amount of excessive carbon emissions from commuting in single passenger cars.
A dense city is about the best organization of people for the environment. To get things you need, you travel the furthest distance. You centralize utilities and infrastructure. You preserve natural habitats. You reduce the effective footprint, actual and resource-wise, of the average person by huge amounts. It maximizes the effectiveness of public transport, and makes private transport less valuable. It makes transport modes like bikes, ebikes, scooters, or even walking viable. And people generally seem to prefer it.
Of course it's America, the incentives are completely messed up. The carbon tax exists as the one policy that everyone agrees would have helped reduce fossil fuel use to help avert global warming.
The other big environmental issue we face (well that we aren't facing up to) is the sixth mass extinction, which is primarily coming from sprawl. And the simple solution to that is to property tax the shit out of land in the exurbs and suburbs so that urban organization of housing is cheaper than suburban and rural, which is currently the opposite.
The externality to sprawl is the illusion that land is infinite. It most certainly is not. The real abundant supply in modern human architecture is going vertical, or even subterranean.
To get back to liberal cities where housing supply is being restricted, this is DIRECTLY causing environmental impacts, and has been for decades. It's not just a racial issue, it is very much an environmental one.
You can't really tax people money they don't have. Maybe it'd work in suburbs, but generally (at least in american cities) the more rural areas consist of
1. Farmland owners who likely contribute resources and get tax deductions anyway 2. mid-low income homeowners far from the city who's property cost as a whole pales in comparison to the cities. Either because of mass emmigration (which can be "White Flight" at worst, or simply dwindling resources/income at best in an evolving world) or simply happening to own/inherit land before costs went out of control.
There's not much to squeeze out of these people to begin with. And not exactly any alternative land to offer them that wouldn't be to their massive benefit (Again, this land isn't exactly valuable to begin with, comparatively speaking). Housing struggles to keep up as is and can't really afford this altruistic effort to try and consolidate everyone into a densely packed area.
But a long term phase-in over a decade, which also is difficult to sustain over successive administrations and controls of congress, would be ideal. Obviously American governance is too incompetent to achieve that.
The carbon tax is for the current largest environmental threat: global warming.
But the sixth mass extinction will probably be the next big environmental issue once GW mitigations come into play. And the key to that is a big land tax to change incentives. And the same issues arise: how to avoid shock pricing and instead phase in over an economically adaptable timeframe.
It even has the same technological potential solutions but lack of supply: vertical farms and artificial meat have the potential to eliminate huge swathes of land that are currently used for 1) grazing and 2) crops that feed grazing animals.
Vertical farming and artificial meat should be getting massive research subsidies right now. Every research university should have substantial grants pursuing these. Because the habitats that we can reclaim back to nature and hopefully avert a total collapse of the "species web" is very important.
I feel we are constantly playing russian roulette with extinctions. Was this species so important that everything collapses? No. Well, how about this one? This one?
I mean, insect populations are dropping. Insects. Very concerning.
Sprawl is only bad in big cities. In a city of 250k, it's not really a big deal.
The waste of time, energy and the resulting pollution are mind blowing.
I recently had a recruiter try to convince me to move back to the midwest by throwing numbers about how median housing prices were over $500k less in my hometown then where I am now on the west coast. I don't need a house with my lifestyle right now, but I'll probably just move back if/when that changes. I enjoy living in a west coast city but not at the cost of 500k-1mil additional housing costs for a smaller place with less land. I'd be just as content moving back and using some of that extra money to travel or fund a long-term sabbatical.
It is cheaper for sure, but it's not quite as I expected. Most of the desirable homes have doubled or tripled since 2020. They are still under a $1 million and usually have quite a bit more land, but most medium size cities have seen huge increases in housing costs and rent.
They are about 0.5% of my neighborhood and are built by all sorts of people, but always for the same reason: Housing is an asset class. In some places, its expected return is always positive even without rental income.
You should buy in those places. If you leave it empty, you get an appreciating asset, and the demand for homes to live in remains the same.
And then, there are places like Kharian, where there is huge demand for the idea of housing, but the living is mostly done elsewhere. See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fOYJ3_ZppM
At least in my area, developers spend over half of the expense of the home on land (including the legal/political costs of getting it up zoned) and “horizontal development” (utilities, impact fees, permit costs, roads, environmental mitigation, drainage, etc.)
If just breaking ground costs you $400k per lot, then it doesn’t make a ton of sense to build 1500 square foot starter homes that will sell for $600k instead of 3500 square foot McMansions that will go for $1.2mn
Like, there is no need to rail against people not changing their mind two years before you might reasonably expect them too. Besides, it would behoove you to reserve your judgement here and let results speak for themselves lest you fall into the same behavior you decry.
Good shout on the whole "build more houses to have more houses" thing though.
EDIT it's been three years and not two
https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/3012312/c...
I have to wonder if it is ever possible to build enough in the places everyone wants to live for it to become cheap?
Manhattan is extremely dense and yet, incredible expensive. More expensive than nearly every less-dense area. So density isn't helping drive cost down.
It shouldn't be. That is describing the demand side of the equation.