[flagged]
SFH can not work with regular transit. It's impossible.
Fortunately, self-driving cars will finally put the transit out of misery within this decade.
You have to move into dense helks, because it is the only place with decent jobs.
California has been trying this for decades and it really isn’t working out, except maybe for people with very high salaries.
Increasing density is the only realistic way to address housing affordability.
Yes? Why is that bad? And I want everyone to be able to do the same, and not get crammed into microapartments.
> Increasing density is the only realistic way to address housing affordability.
No single large Western European or American city lowered housing costs by increasing density within the last 30 years. Your _only_ option to reduce housing costs is to reduce the population.
It's as simple as that.
The only example I can think of is Minneapolis, and they have seen lower rent increases than similar cities, so it seems successful.
But outside of that, I just don’t think it’s been tried enough to really make any conclusions right now.
Moscow, Tokyo, Minneapolis, Seattle.
Moscow is the one most familiar to me personally. They went full-in on density, demolishing 5-story buildings and putting in 20-story towers instead with the speed only possible in a corruption-filled society. You can guess what happened with housing costs.
> The only example I can think of is Minneapolis, and they have seen lower rent increases than similar cities, so it seems successful.
If I remove the labels from these graphs, would you be able to tell which one of them is MN and which one is WI: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1N1sc ?
Rents are not a useful indicator short-term, they can be strongly affected by various transitionary events and the rent datasets are notoriously unreliable. But even then, the rent in MN is not affected that much: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?g=1N1sB&heig...
> But outside of that, I just don’t think it’s been tried enough to really make any conclusions right now.
It's been tried. With the expected results: more misery and higher housing costs. There are all these hilarious articles as a result: https://archive.strongtowns.org/journal/2023/4/26/upzoning-m...
Or Tokyo, it always cracks me up.
2016 - "Tokyo may have found the solution to soaring housing costs": https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?g=1N1sB&heig...
2024 - "Whoops, nope. It's in an even worse bubble": https://www.ft.com/content/40ce3cdc-5bc3-486f-b9e9-700af1087...
Seems like we need to solve the demand part of the puzzle as well. There’s definitely no single easy solution here.
It could also be that too few cities have increased housing supply, so the local effect is totally overwhelmed by a national or global effect.
Either way, the bill is going forward, so we will be able to see the effects and reevaluate its effectiveness.
I don’t think the idea of “just let the population go down” is a reasonable approach. Especially since it will be poorer people pushed out, even lifelong residents who are displaced by highly paid newcomers.
It’s better to try something new and find out you were wrong than to never even try to solve the problem.
Yes. And there will always be something else explaining the rising costs. You ban foreign investors (see: Vancouver)? You get local investment companies buying the properties instead. You start doing rent control? You get tons of dilapidated housing with generational poverty, among other skyrocketing market-based housing.
> Seems like we need to solve the demand part of the puzzle as well. There’s definitely no single easy solution here.
There actually is. Stop trying to make density happen. Instead, promote suburbs and smaller cities. It's as simple as that.
> I don’t think the idea of “just let the population go down” is a reasonable approach.
You don't get other options.
> Especially since it will be poorer people pushed out, even lifelong residents who are displaced by highly paid newcomers.
"Poor people" are the ones suffering from urbanization the most.
And no, Austin is not an example. It stopped the bubble by reducing the population. As did Denver, btw.
And yeah, I absolutely hate density. It's murdering Western civilization and the very fabric of democracy.
I’m not going to keep on arguing with you on this because what would be the point? I attempted to have a reasonable conversation and you repeatedly showed that you will not consider any nuance.
And? The situation is _always_ more complicated.
Yet somehow, all these complications always lead to one outcome. We'll soon see how California becomes even more polarized politically, with the agricultural parts probably engaging in real terrorism out of powerlessness and poverty. While the coastal cities will have even higher and higher housing costs.
Those who blame others of collectivism have the weirdest sense of entitlements...
You can keep trying to make everyone's life worse by making dense city living inevitable, but it will just make _everyone's_ life worse (very much including yours).
Or you can try to advocate for ways to _improve_ the life of everyone.
Development costs spiral once you cross the 1ac threshold because them you have to do stormwater permitting (which is federal in some cases) and that adds a ton of cost and wastes developable land. And then the scrutiny this brings can cause you problems on other axis. This is why newly built houses in the middle of nowhere on a bunch of acres.
Pretty much every commercial development, pretty much every cookie cutter residential subdivision of multiple houses, is saddled with costs that the sort of "5-over-1 here, shoehorn a duplex and some townhomes in there" type development 15min cities type people love isn't.
Stormwater permitting is the driving force behind why developments get laid out the ways that they do. It's why every big box store, every residential subdivision, every warehouse building, they all have the same dozen shapes oriented in one of the same dozen ways on the lot. This is also why every residential subdivision ever has an HOA, someone needs to be responsible for maintaining whatever the stormwater infrastructure is in perpetuity.
Some commercial warehouse building or dozen houses on 1/8ac each are punitively taxed (by enforcing additional expensive requirements) whereas dense residential development is not.
Corporate taxes are not a good proxy because they are imposed at the location of corporate headquarters. Which are almost always in the Downtowns even if the workers who produce all the value live in suburbs.
Ditto for sales taxes.
This is unironically the current state of things. If you want to live in a semi dense suburban area which is within walking distance of transit, restaurants, and parks, then you're pretty much out of luck or you're paying millions for the handful of houses that meet that demand.
It's not even that hard to do. Pass tax incentives for companies opening offices in smaller cities, tax incentives for remote work, and tax the dense office space.