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Comment by motorest | Hacker News Reader

> Europe will do everything, except build more housing supply, to lower rents.

I recommend you open Google maps, google Barcelona, and look at it. The whole city is a dense urban area, surrounded by steep hills. The whole city is covered with >6 story apartment blocks. This isn't the US, where you need to drive 8h to the nearest town.

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I recommend you looking into this new tech called steel. It allows you to build vertically extremely tall buildings.

And turn beautiful historical cities into American downtown copies?

Woah, I wish and dream of a city in America with a higher population density than Barcelona!

We dream about and wish for different things.

Someone hasn’t seen what Spanish cities look like outside the casco viejo…

Not the case of Barcelona, though. The areas surrounding the old town are specially beautiful

And skyscrapers are going to make it somehow better?

Yes. Because apparently, Europe has to meet the bloated housing demand that is being caused by American and foreign investors so that they can arbitrage and make $$$ by gentrifying the locals...

Barcelona is one of the densest cities in Europe, probably THE densest if you include L'Hospitalet. It would rank top 5 in density when compared to any US city

But it’s trending down (fairly dramatically) over time.

I couldn’t find stats quickly for Barcelona but in other places the amount of space per person takes up in housing has gone way up. People now simply won’t accept housing conditions that were normal in the past.

If more housing doesn’t get built but each person demands more space faster than the population declines the outcome seems obvious.

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