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Comment by cyberax | Hacker News Reader

> I defy the data.

Sorry. The reality doesn't care about your defiance.

Upzoning does not lead to lower housing prices. Even the most extreme urbanists admit that: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2023/4/26/upzoning-might...

> and the law of supply/demand has been proven too frequently

Ah, here it is. Have you considered that there, you know, might be "too much complexity" for "Economy 101" to fully explain the situation?

The _only_ way to decrease the housing prices is to BUILD MORE SUBURBS. Or even new cities entirely.

You don't have any other options. Sorry again.

Well, maybe one more: the Detroit route. Reduce the city population and the prices will go down.

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Firstly, your link is focused on zoning changes, specifically how they are insufficient to prompt addition supply to be built.

From your linked blog post:

> Freemark finds extremely mixed and uncertain evidence for the effects of upzoning, and one of several reasons he identifies is that the link between upzoning and actual housing production is tenuous. In other words, “Are they allowed to build it?” is a different question from, “Are they building it?”

Secondly, building more suburbs and more cities increases the supply… which indicates agreement that the price problem is one of insufficient supply.

EDIT: To be perfectly clear, the data I disagree with is that increasing supply in Minneapolis failed to impact price. This is the contention of the comment I responded to, and it is fundamentally different from the claim that zoning changes fail to increase supply.

> Firstly, your link is focused on zoning changes, specifically how they are insufficient to prompt addition supply to be built.

Yeah. The misery pushers (urbanists) can't admit outright that their ideology is leading to disaster, can they? So they now need not only zoning restrictions lifted, but the state must also build housing and give it out to "deserving" people for cheap.

> Secondly, building more suburbs and more cities increases the supply… which indicates agreement that the price problem is one of insufficient supply.

I'm not arguing against supply-and-demand in general (I'm not a communist idiot). I'm arguing against the _density_ increases.

> EDIT: To be perfectly clear, the data I disagree with is that increasing supply in Minneapolis failed to impact price.

But it did. The real estate transaction index clearly shows that there were no positive effects from the new construction.

Moreover, I analyzed all the real estate sales in the US, Canada, and parts of Europe since 1995. I have not found a single example of a large (>100k population) city that decreased the housing sale prices by increasing density.

Even during the crash of 2007, the dense housing crashed less than comparative nearby sparse housing.

The scholarly literature is also unambiguous. The best effects of density increases are either mild (transient effects on rent), or indirect (migration chains).

You keep referring to people who like cities that function as cities as "misery pushers" and then in the same breath doing as much as you can to create an association between increased density and all these hypothetical negative possibilities. Likewise it just seems as though you've developed some level of prejudice based on the negative experience you're contending with in your neighborhood, and then extrapolating that quite severely, because you think you've been lied to. It's tricky to reconcile how if you were inclined to be optimistic about the prospect of urbanism to begin with, you'd be so intensely and easily convinced otherwise, or surprised that the creation of an arbitrary higher density building didn't turn your low density town into European capital city overnight. Like how does it happen that you lived in no specific place in Europe for example, then to where you are now, and one thing gets built which convinces you that actually every city in Europe is and has always been wrong.

Your chart shows two lines that seem to represent sales of something over time in nearby cities, which may or may not be relevant, but are at most a narrow slice of what one would need to look at in order to understand what's going on over in Minneapolis if anything.

You then create a strawman who thinks the removal of zoning restrictions will automatically lead to a utopia in which we have no other human problems or economic systems to contend with, even going so far as to dismiss someone on the basis of a lacking argument against a claim that nobody made.

> You keep referring to people who like cities that function as cities as "misery pushers"

That's an apt description.

> in the same breath doing as much as you can to create an association between increased density and all these hypothetical negative possibilities.

Why are they hypothetical? Density has long been associated with worse outcomes (higher crime, etc.). I can provide plenty of citations to scholarly literature.

> Like how does it happen that you lived in no specific place in Europe for example, then to where you are now

I grew up in Russia (Izhevsk), moved to Germany (Karlsruhe), then to Ukraine (Kyiv), and (briefly) to the Netherlands before coming to the US. I did not have a car in any of these places.

> and one thing gets built which convinces you that actually every city in Europe is and has always been wrong.

Yes. I'm able to compare the life in the US and in Europe first-hand. And Europe has plenty of dark secrets of its own. For example, Copenhagen in Denmark became the world's most liveable city by ruthlessly controlling its population. It still has not reached its peak number in 1970-s. Bet you didn't know that?

> Your chart shows two lines that seem to represent sales of something over time in nearby cities, which may or may not be relevant, but are at most a narrow slice of what one would need to look at in order to understand what's going on over in Minneapolis if anything.

I have real estate data with street-level information. It's not a public dataset, so I'm replicating my results using public datasets.

> You then create a strawman who thinks the removal of zoning restrictions will automatically lead to a utopia

No. I'm saying that removal of zoning limits to allow increased density does NOT lead to lower prices. It leads to increased density and increased misery as a result.

Minneapolis is simply a good example of this. There is another very good one: Seattle (where I live now). It increased its density by 25% over the last 12 years, many times leading the nation in the number of active construction cranes. The result? Faster price growth than even in SF.

> No. I'm saying that removal of zoning limits to allow increased density does NOT lead to lower prices. It leads to increased density and increased misery as a result.

I never made that claim.

> It's not a public dataset, so I'm replicating my results using public datasets.

You'll need to do better than just comparing real estate sales. If you're going to make a coherent argument based on data, it should at least attempt to show the relationship between more datapoints than just arbitrary sales and time, especially with only a 6 year timespan. Whether there's something there or not, you're not providing a substantial enough analysis to be compelling here.

It's fine if you don't like denser areas. Plenty of people who grow up in denser cities move out because they feel like they're sick of people, but cities wouldn't be cities if they're wasn't a reason to be there, and many people prefer it. There's not a chance in hell I'd move back to a car dependent hellscape, because I grew up in one, and that's true misery to me.

> It increased its density by 25% over the last 12 years, many times leading the nation in the number of active construction cranes. The result? Faster price growth than even in SF.

Again, weird cherry-picked comparison that wouldn't surprise anyone who's aware of the two tech hubs.

What about Austin, where they have aggressively upzoned and built, and now housing prices are down?

Austin is an interesting case. It tripped me up a bit when I saw it.

But it turned out that my prediction was correct because the Austin population went _down_ during the pandemic.

Population:

2019 - 978,763

2022 - 975,418

2023 - 979,882

The overall Travis County population went up a bit. And the prices, in the places other than Austin, are also up.

I can also give a prediction, if Austin population growth recovers (not a given), the price growth rate will quickly outpace the surrounding Travis County.

Looking at the population of Austin proper is pretty silly here, and similar just looking at Travis. The city proper lost population from 2019-2020 as many cities did during the early pandemic, but grew each year since. The Austin metro area has grown every one of these years.

In every comparable city in the country, housing prices are up. In Austin, they are down.

> In every comparable city in the country, housing prices are up. In Austin, they are down.

Now compare the population. Travis County population (sans Austin) went up, so the prices are also up. And Travis County actually has _more_ new units than Austin proper.

The driver for the price decreases in Austin is the population drop, not the new construction.

Population dropped 2019-2020, but population has increased each year since 2020, both in Austin proper and austin greater metro area. Housing prices increased until about 2022 when they started dropping, and (along with rent) have been trending downwards since.

If your point is, "construction has to outstrip population increase in order to decrease prices", then well, yeah, we agree fully.

If your point is that huge amounts of new units going on the market in Austin does not have a significant impact on prices, I don't think that's supported by any evidence or makes any sense.

The _only_ way to decrease the housing prices is to BUILD MORE SUBURBS. Or even new cities entirely.

Preach brother. Might I also add the possibility of encouraging migration from Metropolises to regional 100k - 200kish cities?

Yup. It's pretty much the only way to fix the housing crisis.

I think that 300k is the threshold for a good city size.

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