Not housing per-se, but concentrating too many jobs in few locations. Which causes issues with housing.
This unlocks the possibility for serendipitous connections. It is awesome when you can meet a founder, a leading engineer, an investor, a designer and a PR person in a coffee line, forming a new company before finishing your morning coffee.
Talents concentrated in one place gives significant boost to their productivity. This is called a "proximity bonus" in video games; building dependent factories in the nearby slots gives them the productivity boost. This is what US is missing by being nimbyistic.
I think we should return to the 1950s ideas of a futuristic cities and invest in building giant arcologies, where entire Earth population can move if they want to, and where the least paid McFastFood worker would afford to buy a minimum apartment.
And don't call it a "collapse": a change is not necessary to the worse, sometimes it is to the better.
In theory it will stop warming, which may cause many people to take that as "Well, looks like we can go back to burning fossil fuels!".
But even here in just-over-500k city people are already resorting to Zoom calls from one's office/home (or lake-side getaways) over meeting in coffeeshop.
What I meant is an ability to be within the reach of any other person within an hour.
Using zoom for 3 years now (for obvious reasons) - I find it inferior to the private in-person communication. Problem that you need to schedule a meeting, which adds some formality and is usually harder, while you can have a pleasant chat with even a rich and powerful person while accidentally meeting them in a hall. For scheduling a zoom call, you need to find an excuse. To chat in a hall with someone - you don't need and excuse.
Is that all that significant? I live rurally and can be within reach of any other person in two different large cities (along with some smaller ones) within an hour. Under some circumstances, I can be at a shared meeting place in one of those cities before a person who lives in said city can get there. The highway is incredibly efficient.
Moreover, such proximity to the city – but also off the beaten path – seems to make it an attractive place for the rich and famous to have homes. I run into household names at the small town coffeeshop quite regularly.
What is significant, however, is the the city is much more amenable to wealth concentration. That small town coffeeshop might see 100 customers in a day, while a coffeeshop in a dense city can draw on thousands of customers, allowing a coffeeshop empire to be established. The small town coffeeshop will never be able to grow the same way.
Run out of anything and it's just a 20 minute drive to go grab more from the factory.
Ugh, I hope not. The 50s was the most infantile era, completely preoccupied with convenience and efficiency and big things that go wrooar. The vision of the future in the 50s was so cringey.
I think the modern doom and gloom era is very depressing. I am a technocrat and a futuristic optimist.
For me, the modern popular vision of future is not worth living for.
The popular vision for the future is _exactly_ technocratic.
> I am a [...] futuristic optimist
Me too. But 50s era techno-fetishization is not the lever to achieve a better future.
Jobs weren't "concentrated" per se by any form of planning or centralized action, employers simply shifted to urban centers because the amount of skilled workers and other necessities (such as high speed Internet, universities, road and rail infrastructure) was vastly higher there than in dilapidated flyover-state villages. Additionally, rural areas got devastated by mechanization of agriculture following WW2 and later-on the closure of manufacturing plants and the mining industries [1], which led to a massive rural flight movement as everyone who could fled to the only place where employment was available - urban areas.
The fix to the housing crisis would be to invest in rural areas again - there is no limitation in the nature of the work at all that stuff like a callcenter or a bunch of programmers can't work from some rural town, but as long as there is no actual high speed Internet or no amenities (healthcare, education institutions for children, entertainment) worth their name employers won't establish shop there and employees won't move there. Would you, even for free rent, move to some small town where your children have no perspective?
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/01/where-d...
The fix is to enable builders to build enough housing, and not just single family detached housing, by removing regulations which allow NIMBY-ism. At the same time, prevent investors from hoarding houses and jacking up the prices. I find it similar to scalping GPU's and reselling them for more money, which was a common practice in the past few years during the chip shortage and crypto mining boom. This kind of investment provides very little value to consumers, and in my view only serves to extract money from the poor to the rich.
This is the short term fix, and I completely agree with you.
The long term fix is, aside from letting local governments make minor regulatory changes to facilitate denser urban construction, to simply do nothing.
Cities are expensive. People will (and are) moving away from HCOL areas because of this. Businesses are adapting (e.g., with remote work) to hire people living in MCOL and LCOL areas. At the same time, new economic agglomerations are springing up in these areas to support growing populations.
Given enough time, two things will happen. Many of these MCOL and LCOL areas will become more expensive. Some will urbanize. Some wont. Second, eventually, people living in the areas that don't urbanize will realize that they actually would enjoy living in a HCOL area. And the cycle will continue.
LOL, I wish. Renting in Munich for enough money that I'll never be able to save enough for a downpayment. If I ever want to own my home, I'll have to move to the German equivalent of Alabama, with all the issues that come with that.
> The fix is to enable builders to build enough housing, and not just single family detached housing, by removing regulations which allow NIMBY-ism.
Where? Seriously, where?! Urban areas literally don't have enough space left any more to build any kind of building at affordable prices (plot values have sometimes doubled over four years here [1]), not to mention the associated followup costs of high-density populations (you need expensive subways as public transport at some point, denser / more anonymous populations leading to lower societal cohesion and rising crime as a result) or the fact that most urban areas simply are unsustainable regarding climate change in the long term (no trees to provide shade = lots of heat).
[1] https://www.sueddeutsche.de/muenchen/muenchen-grundstueckspr...
Agricultural land here in the Netherlands sells at 6 euro per m2. With a single stroke of a pen that ground can become 300 euro per m2, when the municipality decides you can build a house there.
Same process in Germany. There is more than enough space. Problem is the price of plots is kept artificially high by municipalities, because they rely on the easy money it provides to finance their projects.
Then again those prices are in dying areas with little going on.
Hard disagree here. Munich, Berlin and Hamburg simply don't have much land in their borders any more. In Munich, we only have two major unpopulated areas left - the SEM Nord (900 ha, 50.000 people) and SEM Nordost (600 ha, 30.000 people) [1], and the currently under construction projects Freiham (25.000 people) and Bayernkaserne (15.000 people).
The opposition to these projects does have valid points, too: a city as large as Munich absolutely needs recreational areas for the populace as well as green areas for micro-climate and recreation, and the amount of both is really really low - the traffic to the existing lakes or the nearby Bavarian Alps is already immense and the areas are all struggling with the regional-tourist population issues like overcrowded trains, trash being left everywhere including in natural reserves or on farm land [2], overcrowded parking lots and vandalism [3], leading to sometimes outright violence against tourists from Munich [4].
"Just build more dense housing" may sound like an easy way out, but (too) dense housing has immense followup costs as well as all these people have to have other options in their lives than slave away as corporate drones and sleep. Otherwise, you end up with Japan-style psychological issues.
[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/St%C3%A4dtebauliche_Entwicklun...
[2] https://www.abendzeitung-muenchen.de/muenchen/umland/ausflue...
[3] https://www.merkur.de/lokales/region-tegernsee/dasgelbeblatt...
[4] https://www.abendzeitung-muenchen.de/bayern/tourismus-in-bay...
Take this area, plenty of plots now housing cows. Distance to city centre (by car!) is 20 minutes.
Same thing to the North West, in between Munich, Grobenzell, Puchheim...
Buddy you are buying into the horsecrap being told by current homeowners. "It's full!"... Nope, not really. Just like in the Netherlands, about 50% of land in Germany is farmland. And even outside of big cities like Amsterdam and Munich there's plenty of space left. But you're not allowed to build there, let alone build high apartment complexes...
That area is precisely the site of the SEM Nordost [0], one of the two major remaining new construction areas. And as you can see on that newspaper map, it's the border of the city - the area to the east is already Aschheim territory. Munich cannot build outside of its borders, no matter how much farmland there is.
> Just like in the Netherlands, about 50% of land in Germany is farmland.
Uh, yeah, we have to grow the food we eat somewhere, Germany has over 80 million people to feed. We already import way too much food from elsewhere, especially the Amazon rainforest where beef for export to Europe is made on burned down rainforest area.
The territory of the city of Munich is already full, and you completely ignored my last point above, that a city also needs green areas for fresh wind to come into the city, recreational areas for the people, and that high-rises and other highly dense developments bring their own problems with them.
[0] https://www.hallo-muenchen.de/muenchen/suedost/muenchen-boge...
I remember when Mayor DeBlasio (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_de_Blasio) was running for Mayor in NYC. He was hugely against high-rise high-density condos in Brooklyn adjacent (4th Ave) to expensive $2M+ brownstones (incidentally where he lived, in Park Slope!)
He was the "left" candidate and didnt seem to understand the concept of supply and demand. Nor the concept that no every city dweller can afford a $2M brownstone.
The problem is that Left and Right alike wants to perpetuate the system because they are all so fully bought into the system. I'm sure Mayor DeBlasio fully understood the economics here, but supported NIMBYism because he and his money base wants to keep their wealth.
That also means this isnt a left or right issue, its more of a hopeless issue. The only way out is to buy into the system and join them.
There’s actually a really big, fundamental problem with this approach. Cities hugely subsidize rural infrastructure already. Tax income generated by rural (and even suburban) developments can’t repay the construction and maintenance cost required for upkeep. Partly because it’s not dense, and partly because typical rural/suburban economic development looks like a stroad with chain restaurants and huge parking lots. (Where most of the land isn’t being economically productive, and the land that is isn’t really boosting the local economy that much.)
In the UK, jobs used to be at local factories and offices. It was rare for people to move for university then move to another city for work.
My Grandad worked at a local electronics factory. My Dad worked at a local auto parts refurbishment factory. My mother in her early 20s worked as a secretary for the emergency services. Moving away for university and then again to another city for work was almost unheard of. You worked and lived close to your family. Of course the 80s came along and everything changed.
most of those jobs in the 80s require only basic education
but when you have thousands of graduates coming out of universities, they'll be looking at very specific job positions, not any office job near home