In New York we built like 100k new units in the 2010s but we grew by 500k people and still, the default position of people who theoretically advocate for cheaper housing is to block new development.
There is also an abundance of habitable land with nobody living there or using it, as a road trip around North America will attest.
Naturally it might not make economic sense to develop there at this time, but that could change with regulatory/legal changes or by virtue of improved technology or increased population.
The population density of the United States is 33.6/km^2.
The population density of Canada is 4.2/km^2.
The population density of the United Kingdom is 270.7/km^2.
The population density of Germany is 232/km^2
There's no shortage of space in North America, your road-tripping experience to the contrary.
I've thought a lot about this topic (in the sense of creating car-free cities in america), and it is technically feasible, but only if some benevolent billionaire were basically able to find some viable place, and build an entire city in place, and then create a deal with major employers to move their offices there, somehow fund the relocation of people who have already built a life for themselves elsewhere, and are already high up in these companies with homes and counter-incentives from moving elsewhere, and then somehow getting other people without any economic incentive to also move there.
At the end of the day it's a pie-in-the-sky fantasy. Unless you're trying to court people who already have too much money to worry about housing prices (think Celebration, FL), then there is far, far too much cost and risk involved to do it. There is also a graveyard of failed attempts (see: California City, CA).
The reason why this crisis happened is exactly that we have stopped allowing organic city growth from happening. Fixed-zoning is the problem, and does not allow for incremental growth. That the crisis didn't happen in the 60's is only because the proliferation of the automobile allowed cities to expand outward, but that outward expansion has a limit (when highway capacity is breached in such a way where commuting from exurban distances is completely unfeasible), and we hit that limit around the late 90's, when we saw the first housing crisis.
Even in Tokyo, a city mostly touted as one with minimal zoning, housing is still pricey (by Japanese standards) with standards at the low end many Americans wouldn’t accept (although I think we need more low end housing like this in the USA). And most of Japan’s young people want to live in Tokyo, it’s obvious not all of those who want to live there can.
It's only politically feasible when the folks you're telling to live somewhere else are a political minority, and, to be honest, until the last few years, that's been the the only response. Now that millennials are becoming the dominant political force, it's just not going to fly.
In cities in California they are literally creating company town-style housing for educators and other jobs that cities cannot afford to compensate with enough money to afford housing. Anyone who isn't directly benefiting from the system can trivially understand how inefficient and absurd it is, but the fact is that people who are benefiting from the system are wildly over-represented in terms of active voters. That's obviously changing.
The worst thing a city can do for housing affordability is simply having a bunch of high paying jobs that attract people to move in. In that case, it doesn’t matter if you build like crazy as in Beijing or Shanghai, or if you have minimal zoning like Tokyo or Houston, housing costs are going to soar because people will want to move there, and you won’t be able to satisfy demand without raising prices.
>In that case, it doesn’t matter if you build like crazy as in Beijing or Shanghai, or if you have minimal zoning like Tokyo or Houston, housing costs are going to soar because people will want to move there, and you won’t be able to satisfy demand without raising prices.
This is objectively false.
A nation wide housing crisis in a few select cities where people want to live? Or a "nation wide" crisis that you can't solve even by moving to Detroit or Bakersville? Because I"m pretty sure I started this with:
> Why isn’t “go live somewhere else” a part of the answer though?
Meaning, we all can't live in Seattle, LA, Portland, or San Francisco, so why make that a right that can't be satisfied? All of these are already dense cities by American standards, and its clear, looking at plenty of examples from around the world, that popular city densities can increase a long time before there is any real impact in the housing market (I don't think any popular city has tried building itself out of its own local housing crisis before...they just give up to the market eventually, or call for a fixed set of winners via rent control or national subsidized Singaporean flats).
You are just refusing to see the obvious. Having lived in Beijing for 9 years and Lausanne for 2 years, I see absolutely nothing special about California’s housing market that exempts it from supply and demand economics that the rest of the world is forced to follow.
> You speculate a lot in this post, but have zero citations to back it up.
If you live in a glass house, it isn’t very wise to throw stones (i.e. you didn't provide any citations either).
You want to ignore the underlying political problem with “go live somewhere else” and it is the only reason it’s being discussed in the first place.
In the case of New York, it will never have "enough" housing - what will instead happen is, eventually, it will become so overgrown that it will be unattractive for new arrivals.
One of the few things both sides should be able to agree on is that it's awful when wealthy outsiders start buying property.
People who block housing in cities because they don't want the cities to be "overcrowded" are ridiculous because:
1. Cities are by definition dense areas
2. If you don't want to live somewhere dense, move where fewer people want to live
3. Your right to your own property doesn't extend past it
4. You are destroying productivity and allowing landlords to extract excess productivity from the whole population, so the effect is almost definitely not the one that you think it is.
For smaller communities in ecologically fragile areas, there are more nuanced arguments, but even then those people should prefer managed density because:
1. Density keeps sprawl at bay and is better for the environment
2. Residents won't be able to afford to live on their little patch unless they own the land
3. Even then their area will become a museum around them and they certainly won't be able to preserve the idyll they wish to.
In any case, most of the supply problems can be solved without major changes to what people often refer to as "neighborhood character". Everything from ADUs to just allowing a few extra stories does quite a bit to increase the capacity of an urban area.
>There is a conflict between people who want to live in an area and people who don't want that area to become overcrowded
Yes. Obviously.
>That's the problem statement in a nutshell, and it's unfortunately complex both logistically and emotionally (and therefore politically, too), which is a disastrous combination.
This is already a bipartisan issue. You can see folks like Darrell Owens arguing for it on the far-left, Ezra Klein from a moderate-left position, and Chuck Marohn arguing for changes on the right.
It's only disastrous if your goal is to preserve the status quo of low density (sub)urban housing in the face of massive inequality in this housing costs. This is a classic scenario of a political minority (non-homeowners) facing a ton of pain that is trivially politically solvable, but not being able to do anything about it unless they become they eventually become the political majority... and now they are. And, more importantly, this scenario is does not lead to mean-reversion. We are in the middle of a political cascade. As the millennials become the dominant voting demographic, we should expect the pendulum to accelerate rapidly in the other direction... and that's exactly what we are seeing.
For those homeowners who are suddenly feeling uncomfortable about the political winds on this topic... buckle up. If this is really a cascade (and I think it's obvious that it is), we should expect these changes to accelerate for the foreseeable future. I believe it would be prudent start planning for the changes instead of fighting them.