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Matt Yglesias tries to debunk the claim that building more houses raises local house prices. He presents several studies showing that, at least on the marginal street-by-street level, this isn’t true.
I’m nervous disagreeing with him, and his studies seem good. But I find looking for tiny effects on the margin less convincing than looking for gigantic effects at the tails. When you do that, he has to be wrong, right?
The two densest US cities, ie the cities with the greatest housing supply per square kilometer, are New York City and San Francisco. These are also the 1st and 3rd most expensive cities in the US.
The least dense US city, ie the city with the lowest housing supply, isn’t really a well-defined concept. But let’s say for the sake of argument that it’s a giant empty plain in the middle of North Dakota. House prices in giant empty plains in North Dakota are at rock bottom.
Moving from intuitive thought experiments to real data, we find that indeed, the denser an area, the higher its house prices:
Could this be reverse causation - ie New York is very dense because its prices are so high (which incentivizes developers to squeeze the most out of every parcel of land)? Yes, obviously this is part of the effect. But equally obviously, it isn’t the full effect. Stripped of its density, Manhattan is just a little island off the US East Coast. There are plenty of little islands off the US East Coast - Maine alone has dozens - and none of them are as expensive to live in as Manhattan. Manhattan has a few extra natural amenities, like a river and a good harbor. But nobody moves to Manhattan for the harbor. They moving there because they want to be in a big city - with friends, jobs, museums, and nightlife. This induced demand effect is so strong that it overwhelms the fact that Manhattan has millions more houses than the empty North Dakota plain (or lower-tier cities like Des Moines or Cleveland). So empirically, as you move along the density spectrum from the empty North Dakota plain to Manhattan, housing prices go up.
So I don’t understand why Matt believes that building a few new apartments in some city - a very small move along that spectrum - would do anything other than make local prices go up.
For example, if my home city of Oakland (population 500,000) became ten times denser, it would build 4.5 million new units and end up about as dense as Manhattan or London. But Manhattan and London have the highest house prices in their respective countries, primarily because of their density and the opportunities density provides. I don’t see why Oakland being able to tell a different story of how it reached Manhattan/London density levels (“it was because we were YIMBYs and deliberately cultivated density to lower prices”) would make the end result any different from the real Manhattan or London. But if becoming just as big as Manhattan or London would make Oakland more expensive, shouldn’t we assume that a little step in that direction would make it a little bit more expensive? Wouldn’t the alternative be some kind of highly unparsimonious pricing function like this?:
But doesn’t induced demand violate the economic law of supply and demand? Or doesn’t it (as Yglesias argues) allow an economic perpetual motion machine, where you just keep building houses and generate infinity money as the price of each keeps going up?
No; I think the missing insight is that there’s some pool of geographically mobile Americans who are looking for new housing (or who might start looking if the right situation presented itself). These people have various combinations of preferences and requirements. One common pattern is to prefer any big city - they would be happy to live in Seattle, or NYC, or the Bay, if the opportunity came up. Right now, more Americans prefer to live in big cities than there are housing units in big cities, so prices go up and these people can’t afford their dream. As new cities become “big” (by these people’s criteria), they’ll move to those cities, increasing demand. The fact that big cities remain more expensive than small villages suggests that there are many of these people and they’re currently under-served.
So if Oakland became bigger, it would become a more appealing destination for these people at some rate (making it more expensive) and get more supply at some rate (making it less expensive). Since existing big dense cities are all very expensive, most likely in current conditions the first effect would win out, and Oakland would become more expensive. But it can’t do this forever - at some point, it will exhaust the pool of Americans who want to move to big cities (you’ll know this has happened when housing prices are no higher in big cities than anywhere else). So there’s not perpetual motion - just the ability to keep making money as long as there’s pent-up demand, like in every other part of the economy.
And it doesn’t violate laws of supply and demand; if Oakland built more houses, this would lower the price of housing everywhere except Oakland: people who previously planned to move to NYC or SF would move to Oakland instead, lowering NYC/SF demand (and therefore prices). The overall effect would be that nationwide housing prices would go down, just like you would expect. But the decline would be uneven, and one way it would be uneven would be that housing prices in Oakland would go up.
This isn’t an argument against YIMBYism. The effect of building more houses everywhere would be that prices would go down everywhere. But the effect of only building new houses in one city might not be that prices go down in that city.
This is a coordination problem: if every city upzones together, they can all get lower house prices, but each city can minimize its own prices by refusing to cooperate and hoping everyone else does the hard work. This theory is a good match for higher-level management like Gavin Newsom’s gubernatorial interventions in California.
Tell me why I’m wrong!
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Comments
I feel like this (along with many discussions about urban housing) slightly misses the real issue. A lot of these discussions center around how to make housing affordable in cities and whether denser construction leads to lower housing costs or higher housing costs. But cities don't exist to minimize housing costs. They exist to maximize opportunities: job opportunities, dating opportunities, friendship opportunities, cultural opportunities, and so on. They exist to bring as many people together as easily as possible.
The way that an urban economist would put it is that fundamentally cities are job markets. I would put it a little more broadly and say that cities are opportunities markets. For that reason housing in a dense urban environment will never be as affordable as housing out in rural North Dakota.
If you build more housing in a city, more people move there, and the city becomes more desirable as a result, is the city better or worse off for having built the housing?
I think you got it the wrong way around - cities _form_ around opportunities, rather than produce them.
Initially, geographic advantage (such as being near harbour, river, or some other geographic feature) gives a settlement that's not yet a city a big advantage in attracting more people there. This in turn, forces the city to grow as more people cram in.
To artificially build denser by policy doesn't produce opportunities - those opportunities would have to be there first! And it's this "expensiveness" of creating more accomodation in the city that causes the city to expand.
By rippercushions 2023-05-026:053 reply There are lots of planned cities that are natural experiments in this: Brasilia, Canberra, Ottawa, Abuja etc. They all show that yes, it is possible to "build it and they will come", but it's hugely expensive, takes a long, long time (decades) to get to critical mass, and produced mixed results at best, eg Brasilia's original strictly separated zoning has been widely panned as a disaster. And I'm pretty sure all of those would still suffer gravely if the capital was ever moved out.
Brasilia was not originally planned to have separate zoning, Lucio Costas's vision (Lucio Costa was one of the architects together with Niemeyer to design the city) was one of "superblocks", a block was supposed to be close to self-sufficiency (hence the enormous block sizes), each was to have housing, shops, schools and so on in the block or in neighbouring blocks. The military dictatorship of Brazil decided to revamp the plan and deploy stricter zoning, separating shops from residential areas which made the city a urban hell of traffic and commute.
Brasilia is also what I would call "not a city", it has a pretty large population which doesn't live in it like in a city. There's very few vibrant public places there, from an urbanist perspective it's a complete disaster.
By lozenge 2023-05-029:46 Grand city plans usually fail even with the best intentions. Eg Milton Keynes was meant to be a walking, bike and car friendly town - it achieved one of those.
By midoridensha 2023-05-029:15 Sounds just like a typical US city.
By rippercushions 2023-05-029:23 TIL, thanks for sharing!
> There are lots of planned cities that are natural experiments in this... They ... produced mixed results at best, eg Brasilia's original strictly separated zoning has been widely panned as a disaster.
I'm not sure if there's been some slight shift of topic here. By "planned", I think we originally meant "deliberately built in relatively undeveloped land". But then you mention as an example of a failure of deliberately building a city in relatively undeveloped land, an example of a failure of micromanagement (also a kind of planning, but one that is completely orthogonal to the circumstances of the city's founding).
So does Brasilia's original strictly separated zoning show the problems of strictly separated zoning, or does it show the problems of deliberately building a city where none was before? It's possible we just had the wrong idea of what you need to have a great city during the 20th century isn't it? Washington DC, for instance, is an artificial city with top-down planning, but it was built at a time when people had different ideas about what made a great city, and it doesn't really seem to be a failure. It doesn't even appear on your list, despite being the case that served as a template for your other examples.
(I don't know. I don't know anything about Brasilia other than that it is the capital of Brazil.)
By piva00 2023-05-029:39 Brasilia was designed exactly to not be what it became. The original plan from Lucio Costa introduced the concept of "superblocks" which would be more-or-less self-sufficient, having shops, residential apartments, schools, parks and so on every few superblocks.
The military dictatorship decide to introduce strict zoning (probably lifting ideas that were happening in the USA during the 60s), completely destroying the urbanistic approach of the original design.
It's a failure of micromanagement from authoritarianism, inspired by the misguided (and nowadays considered idiotic) approach to urban design of the USA in the 50s onward.
By midoridensha 2023-05-029:221 reply >Washington DC, for instance, is an artificial city with top-down planning, but it was built at a time when people had different ideas about what made a great city, and it doesn't really seem to be a failure.
As I recall, DC was designed by George Washington himself (probably with help from his friends), back in the late 1700s, but the city as a whole was not: what they designed was the Federal district only. The Capitol, the White House, the National Mall between them, etc. Over time, this grew with the additions of the Smithsonian buildings and many other things.
The thing is, no one lives there. That district is entirely devoid of residential areas in fact, and with very little commercial stuff if any. All that stuff is mostly to the north, and I don't see any evidence of it being planned top-down at all, except maybe the original street layout which is largely a simple grid, with lettered streets running east-west, and a few interesting things like Dupont Circle (which probably came later).
DC is definitely not a place I'd call a "master planned city" or "artificial city"; it's evolved far too much in the last 300+ years.
What is your source here?
I am from DC and it's pretty well known that it is a planned city. Look up the L'Enfant Plan.
I'm not really sure what you are talking about.
By midoridensha 2023-05-032:52 Go look at the map of the L'Enfant Plan. Now compare it to a map of modern-day DC. They aren't the same: the modern city is much larger. The original plan just covers the federal district, street layouts, etc. Georgetown is just a name on the side of the plan, for instance, with no actual plan. The original plan certainly doesn't include the subway system, or Union station and all the train lines, or many many other things.
>> if the capital was ever moved out
I initially read this as meaning "if the money was ever moved out", and then laughed ... yes, if they ever stopped being the capital ...
By midoridensha 2023-05-032:481 reply "Capital" is a weird word in English. It can mean money as you refer to, but it can also refer to the city where a country's seat of government lies. Then there's "capitol" (with an 'o'), which refers to a building in the capital city where the legislative body meets.
By allturtles 2023-05-0315:311 reply There's also upper-case letters, the big letter at the head of a passage, and adjective forms: capital punishment, a capital idea (archaic). This article has a nice discussion of the etymology of capital: https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/financial-word... Usages that started out as living metaphors become 'fossilized' over time as independent meanings.
Don't languages in general have single words with multiple meanings? Is this a special feature of English?
By midoridensha 2023-05-041:07 >Don't languages in general have single words with multiple meanings? Is this a special feature of English?
That's not what I'm referring to; it's the confusion over "capital" vs "capitol" (in addition to the double meaning of capital city vs capital-money).
Two are not mutually exclusive. A city can be formed around the "opportunity" of a river or whatever a thousand years ago, and yet provide new opportunities like tinder having loads of people nearby nowadays.
The people themselves rarely create the opportunity. Take the Bay Area/SF for example, the opportunity is the digital economy and not the people who are mining it. That is, you can have a bunch of software developers (or miners), but if there is no gold to mine, they'll just sit idle (and eventually disperse).
Most cities around the world (except some cities in the US) are "strategically" located near a river or on shore. Because of that, pretty much the whole world live near a river or sea. The most strategically located cities "become" a trading hub and these days have become large cities.
It's well worth mentioning, however, that if the people in the city (who where strategically located for trading) didn't adapt to the changes in the world conditions, then these cities simply disappear or become much less relevant. Many cities of the world would have lost this privilege due to digitalization and the sea becoming safer.
By achenet 2023-05-0213:54 > That is, you can have a bunch of software developers (or miners), but if there is no gold to mine, they'll just sit idle (and eventually disperse).
not sure this is a good example - while it's true for actual gold mining, in the case of software developers, having other software devs around (plus also good computers, which you could argue is like gold) can be an opportunity in itself - look at all the devtools startups that happen in the Bay Area.
A large group of people is an opportunity in itself.
By spacebanana7 2023-05-0213:18 > The people themselves rarely create the opportunity.
It's impossible to separate the people from the social institutions which do create the opportunity in the services sector which dominates modern advanced economies.
In the Bay Area/SF the digital economy is defined by the ecosystem of big tech, VCs, thousands of software engineers and maybe tens of thousands of support services like accountants.
By tap-snap-or-nap 2023-05-027:40 Similarly, cities decline after loss of opportunities and opportunities decline after cities make losses.
By spacebanana7 2023-05-0213:081 reply > To artificially build denser by policy doesn't produce opportunities - those opportunities would have to be there first!
Density is an effective way of substituting for transport speed, which is the binding constraint on many opportunities.
The number of coffee shops I can choose to visit on my 15 minute break after stand up is limited by the density of the urban environment, for a given mode of transport.
Many public, private and social enterprises have this dynamic. A police station needs to be within a certain travel distance of the outskirts of their community to be useful, likewise a supermarket or nightclub.
There is an argument that, at a certain extreme point, density might have such a negative impact on transport speed that it might increase transit time. I'm personally split on this issue. Density definitely hurts motor vehicle speed but has little effect on walking speed and might even improve rail speed.
> Many public, private and social enterprises have this dynamic.
What is the dynamic in "this dynamic" ? Do you have an examples with social enterprises?
By spacebanana7 2023-05-0213:34 > What is the dynamic in "this dynamic"
I intended the phrase "this dynamic" to capture the relationship between transport time and viability of the enterprise.
> Do you have an examples with social enterprises?
Sure thing. Food banks, soup kitchens and homeless shelters all need to be within a viable transport time of the people they intend to help.
By em-bee 2023-05-0210:00 it really depends on the kind of opportunities you are looking for. if i want to form a band or play in a music session then i need to find other players. a larger city is more likely to have players, so the opportunity does not exist until the people are there. same goes for creating a hackerspace or any other group around a topic that is only of interest to a small part of the population.
also networking. there are no opportunities to meet people unless a city is large enough to have events.
movies or theaters, museums, specialty shopping (like a comic book store). anything like that is only sustainable with a large enough local population.
By konschubert 2023-05-029:201 reply I am glad that this is the top comment.
Imagine you build housing such that 5 Million more people can move to Boston. Imagine that housing prices do not go down, and do not go down in other cities either.
That implies that that 5 million more people are now earning Boston-level salaries and 5 million more people were able to make the personal choice to move to Boston.
These 5 million people are on average doing higher-productivity jobs than before, which means economic growth.
Yet at the same time, these 5 million people now have a lower ecological footprint than they would have had if they stayed where they lived before.
These 5 million people are arguably better off, and the rest of society is also better off.
Call me stupid (I am not an economist) but I can't see how your conclusions follow from one another.
> That implies that that 5 million more people are now earning Boston-level salaries and 5 million more people were able to make the personal choice to move to Boston.
...How did those 5 million better-paid jobs got created? How did the 5 million people connect with them? Not everyone is 18-25 y/o you know, a lot of people know one profession and don't want to ever learn another (assuming the jobs pertain to a different profession, but I'd say that's a safe bet that not all of them will cover the professions of these 5 million people).
> These 5 million people are on average doing higher-productivity jobs than before, which means economic growth.
Better salary rarely correlates with better productivity in my experience and observations. People love their titles and prestige and are chasing after them just for the extra salaries they bring. And even if we ignore that, a lot of companies pad budgets for well-known reasons: if you don't spend your entire department's budget then it will be reduced in the next quarter or fiscal year, and you as a manager are very likely to get skipped when handing out bonuses. This has often led to managers hiring expensive consultants that barely do anything. These people are laughing their way to the bank and the economy gains nothing from it (those consultants will not reinvest 100% of the money in the local economy; I'd count it as a huge win if they reinvest even 20% but I have no data proving that they do or that they don't).
So yes, while the new 5 million people could have better salaries, that says almost nothing about productivity or helping the economy at large with this theorized increased productivity.
> Yet at the same time, these 5 million people now have a lower ecological footprint than they would have had if they stayed where they lived before.
I am most of all challenging this one. I've known a lot of people in rural areas years ago, some of them pile wood and small amounts of coal for 3-5 years ahead for prices I'd find laughable and a rounding error in my 3-month expense budget -- and before we talk about ecological impact or CO2 footprint, most of this wood was cut 5 years ago, it's not removing new forests. They manage their heating extremely efficiently. It really opened my eyes how much us the city people look down on others in terms of ecology when in fact we know next to nothing about how is our local electricity procured, how much CO2 it releases in the atmosphere, and how is it even subsidized (a huge topic for another thread / time).
So obviously this is down to context (and I have no idea where does Boston get its electricity, or any such city that your idea might pertain to) but to me this is not as clear and cut as you make it sound.
...And that's not even mentioning rural people getting solar panels and literally having 5-10% of their winter power bill during the summer.
......And it's also not mentioning that some of them did a combination of a family picnic + were gathering dead wood / twigs / dry leaves sometimes and these easily accounted for no less than 5% of all their heating in the cold months. This is not destroying the ecological system, it's merely being super efficient by removing mostly useless bio matter (and very far from such a huge scale that it will hamper enriching the soil, before you say it!).
> These 5 million people are arguably better off, and the rest of society is also better off.
As you yourself alluded to, that's not a given, like at all. 5 million people moving away from rural areas could arguably leave 10+ million elderly people without care or even ability to have their kids arrive to their location quickly if they have a medical emergency.
Which part of "society" is better off? City real estate renters for sure. Who else?
Local sandwich shops, laundromats, coffee joints, ice-cream truck? I'll give you all of those and I like how city people inter-mingle both in terms of physical presence and capital. But I remain skeptical that society as a huge entity is actually better off.
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IMO your take is a very idealistic one. Still, I do my best not to sound like I am attacking you, I am kind of confused that I can't see a single correlation in your string of assertions and I am curious if you can back them up with something more than aggregated (and very diluted) historical statistics.
>How did those 5 million better-paid jobs got created?
I don't think that matters in this argument because the author assumes that housing prices will rise, which would only be possible if there is growth in desirable jobs. If 5 million high paying jobs don't get created, you don't have to worry about rising home prices because very few people would want to live in a place more expensive place on the same income. Instead you'd have a situation like Tokyo where housing prices don't rise.
>I've known a lot of people in rural areas years ago
They are alluding to suburban rather than rural migration. Your average country folk isn't going to suddenly decide to move to NYC. You need about 30 acres for an indefinite supply of firewood. You're probably not going to able to aquire that much land within a reasonable distance of an office, and if you can, you'd be wasting a lot of energy with commuting.
By pdimitar 2023-05-0211:38 > Instead you'd have a situation like Tokyo where housing prices don't rise.
Agreed, that's what I am arguing for in fact. Prices either rise or stagnate, but for them to actually drop... it takes a while until the people who are very invested in the constant growth of the market to realize things don't always work that way, and correct their prices more in tune with reality.
Again though, it takes a long time.
> They are alluding to suburban rather than rural migration.
Ah, fair. Suburban living was economically viable for one brief dreamy moment in time but I am afraid it has not been that for a few decades now.
By TheCoelacanth 2023-05-0213:241 reply Heating an apartment takes far less energy than heating a detached house. Public transit takes far less energy than driving a car. Walking or biking takes even less.
There's no way that urban living isn't far more climate friendly than rural, even if the rural housing is getting some energy from solar or burning wood.
The greater the number of people in a given area the worse it will be for that environment.
Honestly, I even think detached houses beat most apartments. Apartments often depend on electric baseboard radiators and window AC units for heating and cooling. They often have multiple massive hot water heaters where the people on higher floors must leave their water running for 10-15 minutes before they start getting hot water. They also tend to have outdated appliances that are less energy efficient like electric ranges, and old refrigerators and ancient clothes washers/dryers. In most of the apartments I've lived in, it was firmly against the rules to hang your clothes on a line to be dried by wind and sun.
The appliances you get are often not as well maintained either. Tenants aren't pulling out the fridge to clean the coils and landlords rarely do either. Renters don't have the ability to make the kinds of improvements that would reduce their energy bills and landlords are incentivized to cut corners on construction and maintenance since it saves them money and the expensive utility payments are the renter's problem (a problem they can't even know about until after they've signed a lease and gotten their electric bill).
Public transportation is better than driving cars, but most people don't use public transpiration anyway and the number of cars on the road in dense urban settings is much higher than on rural streets. We can see that reflected in the air quality, which is abysmal in highly populated urban centers compared to rural areas.
Urban environments have fewer trees, fewer unpaved expanses of land, more pollution (air, water, light, noise), less wildlife (greater habitat destruction, more poisons and other dangers to animals) and more trash/litter.
Urban settings are by far less climate friendly than rural settings, but certainly we'd have new problems if everyone lived 2 miles from their nearest neighbor.
There's a middle ground that I don't think we've really reached yet but for now it's probably a good thing that we have masses of people concentrated into small tightly packed highly polluted pockets of filth and disease and also wide open spaces where it's clean and quiet, where animals can live, and the air is cleaner. We'd be smart to try to increase the efficiency of the spaces we move into while still avoiding going over the number of humans a given area can sustainably support, but I have a feeling that there will always be people who want to live farther way from anything else than is practical and people who want to live in areas that are too densely populated to be good for the environment.
By TheCoelacanth 2023-05-031:471 reply That's nonsense. You don't get less environmental impact by having every person take up more land. Urban living is much more environmentally friendly because the alternative is paving over more of the environment.
The incentive to make improvements comes from ownership model, not form factor. Apartments can be owned and houses can be rented.
> You don't get less environmental impact by having every person take up more land. Urban living is much more environmentally friendly because the alternative is paving over more of the environment.
It's not about how much land a person uses, it's how that land is being used. Nobody sitting on a 5 or 6 acre lot in the middle of hickville is going to build one house and pave the rest with asphalt. Urban living is "paving over more of the environment" and you can see that with just minutes spent with Google maps looking at satellite views of urban vs rural areas. Rural areas are filled with grasslands and trees (and farms) while urban areas are vast expanses of concrete and asphalt with tiny islands of grass and trees.
People in rural areas take up more land while at the same time using (and abusing) far less of it. Having largely unspoiled nature around you is a big part of the appeal to rural living, or so I'm told, I actually prefer living in cities.
By TheCoelacanth 2023-05-033:471 reply I'm not debating that one acre of urban land is worse for the environment than one acre of rural land, but that's not a realistic tradeoff. You need hundreds or thousands of times as much land to house people in a rural setting than in an urban setting.
Rural people don't pave over all of the land that they have, but they certainly pave over more of it than each person's share of paved over land in an urban setting.
If all the people in the entirety of Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, and the western half of Minnesota lived at the density of NYC, more than half a million square miles or more than 99.9% of the entire land area in those states would be completely untouched wilderness[1]. If you think that all human habitation in Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, and the western half of Minnesota combined has a smaller impact on the environment than 469 square miles of NYC, then you are clearly delusional.
[1] https://www.slate.com/articles/life/culturebox/2014/10/popul...
It's true that if all the people in Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, and the western half of Minnesota were packed into a tiny space with the density of NYC all of the land they abandoned would be better off, but the land they were shoved into would be much much worse off for it.
Like I said: the greater the number of people in a given area the worse it will be for that environment.
We need to find a better balance between stacking people on top of each other and destroying the ecosystem in the places where we live without any thought to biocapacity or local wildlife, and spreading out so far that it's impractical and inefficient to deliver or provide the goods and services humans want.
Since every human takes a massive toll on the local ecosystem, spreading that impact out more than we do in highly packed cities would be better for the environment and also better for humans who also suffer under those types of conditions. As I said, I don't think I've seen that balance hit quite right just yet, but it's something we're going to have to start thinking about more carefully as resources like drinkable water grow scarce, climate refugees from around the world are taken in, people along the costs are forced inland or to higher ground, and much of the western US succumbs to desertification and high temperatures that threaten to make large population centers unsustainable.
The US is likely going to get a lot more crowed in the future. We'll need to find a better way than absolutely trashing the land we settle on and suffering all the effects that go with that.
By TheCoelacanth 2023-05-0313:07 The 469 sq miles they lived in would be more impacted, but the other half million miles would be far less impacted.
It is absolutely ludicrous to suggest that it's better for the environment to take up 1000 times as much of it.
By zip1234 2023-05-040:09 > Nobody sitting on a 5 or 6 acre lot in the middle of hickville is going to build one house and pave the rest with asphalt.
I have actually seen this with concrete, but it is usually grass without trees. However, it isn't really the point. The point is this: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/12/13/climate/clima...
By konschubert 2023-05-037:391 reply I guess the misunderstanding comes from the fact that you consider a garden "environment/nature".
And the parent commenter does not consider a garden "environment/nature".
Nature in general is important because it creates biodiversity and space to roam. Forests in particular are sequestering CO2 and are producing oxygen.
The average garden behind a detached house does approximately none of that.
> I guess the misunderstanding comes from the fact that you consider a garden "environment/nature".
It's cities that depend on gardens and parks to serve as the only available "nature". Rural areas are filled with forests and woods and grasslands and support far greater numbers and varieties of wildlife than cities do.
We could decide to pack people like sardines into the smallest possible space, completely destroy the local ecosystem in the areas where we live (allowing the pollution to spread outside of our overcrowded cities the same way China's pollution currently crosses the ocean to fill the skies in California), while also suffering the countless costs to our own health and safety those conditions cause in the process just so that we can have vast expanses of polluted but undeveloped land that no human can use for anything, but I propose something a bit more balanced, where we spread out enough so that the biocapacity of the land we settle on isn't exceeded, but still near enough to each other that we can still efficiently sustain a civilization. That means a population density that isn't overcrowded, but not so far apart that we lose all of the efficiencies we gain by living near each other. I'd much prefer to have biodiversity within the places we inhabit and keep space to roam for humans as well as the other animals.
By allturtles 2023-05-0312:41 You seem to have a very dim view of cities as medieval hellholes where people are dying of plague in streets filled with sewage under skies choked with soot. Modern cities are not unhealthy places. Life expectancy in New York City[0] compares favorably to most states[1], and this is 2020 pandemic data, where you might expect cities to fare relatively badly.
[0]:https://www.nyc.gov/site/doh/about/press/pr2023/2020-vital-s... [1]: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/life_expectancy/li...
By konschubert 2023-05-0315:08 I don’t know man, have you made an effort to understand the argument?
You are saying “Rural areas have lots of forest”
Yea, but they do because not everybody is living there. If all the city people were moving to the countryside and building houses with big driveways and terraces like the country folk do, there would be much fewer forests.
That’s the point, I don’t know how to make it any clearer.
Cities are not the dirty hellholes you seem to think they are. Pollution doesn’t come from cities, it comes from power plants and factories. And that’s a totally solvable problem
By konschubert 2023-05-0211:17 I - genuinely - don’t have time to write a full response right now.
So I will just pick your first question as an example:
> How did those 5 million better-paid jobs got created? How did the 5 million people connect with them? Not everyone is 18-25 y/o you know,
These jobs got created because companies were able to hire employees into roles that they would otherwise not have been able to fill. and yes, not everybody is 25, but a whole lot of people are…
By amadeuspagel 2023-05-028:56 > If you build more housing in a city, more people move there, and the city becomes more desirable as a result, is the city better or worse off for having built the housing?
Is the existing population of the city better or worse off? That's the question that matters politically, since only the existing population gets to vote in city elections.
By PurpleRamen 2023-05-0211:04 I think you are missing the point. The question of house pricing comes mainly from too many people not able to afford proper living condition, despite the better opportunities.
Of course will a house in the middle of nowhere cheaper than those in better environments. But what worth has the better environment, when most people can't utilize it? At the end, this situation will lead to multiple other problems, like people avoiding overpriced areas, and instead travelling long distances to their workplace in those overpriced areas, which means they waste energy and pollute the environment, have less time for their family & socializing, and so on...
So it doesn't matter for what reason a city might exists or not. The question is which burden it puts on society and to which future it leads.
By iudqnolq 2023-05-0210:06 I feel your discussion uses the wrong metric. The appropriate level for measuring wellbeing is national*. If making a comparatively small number of long-term city residents in a little worse off improves the lives of many citizens of the nation it should be clearly worthwhile.
Many cities have obvious low-hanging fruit. SF is full of 1-3 story housing that could easily be made much denser.
Instead we've created a system where the lucky few whose parents bought housing years ago in desirable areas inherit a ticket to opportunity in a city. That's fundamentally contrary to the ideals of the American Dream.
*Well I actually think this should be global, so I support open borders. But that's a tangent here.
By deelly 2023-05-0213:56 I`m really sorry, but did you read the article?
> But Manhattan and London have the highest house prices in their respective countries, primarily because of their density and the opportunities density provides.
....
> But if becoming just as big as Manhattan or London would make Oakland more expensive, shouldn’t we assume that a little step in that direction would make it a little bit more expensive?
....
> No; I think the missing insight is that there’s some pool of geographically mobile Americans1 who are looking for new housing (or who might start looking if the right situation presented itself).
By bluGill 2023-05-0212:05 Housing is expensive in rural north Dakota as well. Land is cheap which makes things cheaper. However your choice is older houses that are worn out, or spending more than the house is worth to build a new one.
Isn't the obvious arrow here that high prices drives density? The fact that NYC is the densest and most expensive seems to be an obvious story of high prices incentivizing people to build up.
The question is whether or not an old building being replaced by a tower or a single family house will lead to more expensive housing throughout the city. I still am confused as to how density would hurt locally here.
By skybrian 2023-05-024:47 It sounds like positive feedback loop. Some reason (usually jobs) results in higher density, which results in a shortage of housing and higher prices, and that’s an incentive to build denser housing so that more people can move in. The available workforce might attract more employers, and the loop continues.
You might as well ask how cities get started and grow larger. Contrast with farmers.
A positive feedback effect will keep going until there’s negative feedback counteracting it. That’s almost tautological. The specifics will be more interesting.
By engineer_22 2023-05-0121:282 reply I hadn't thought of it like this before, but I think he's arguing that there is a network effect. High density is more convenient, which induces demand.
I realize he is arguing for that but I think its pretty silly to have the chart there showing the correlation if so. He does address the point I made in the article but I think he dismisses it too fast without much evidence.
By engineer_22 2023-05-0121:381 reply Ok I see what you mean
By hnboredhn 2023-05-0121:45 I suppose to expound on my point more - the graph is by people not housing units. Presumably if a cheap city, like Detroit, had a bunch of unused units the graph would not credit it for the built-in density because if its not being used.
By quickthrower2 2023-05-028:421 reply It is harder for us tech workers to fathom, as we work for the global market directly or indirectly, the but a lot of people working in a city are directly serving other people in that city. A person coming in might create more than a jobs worth of “CityGDP” by their simple economic activity.
By MrMan 2023-05-028:52 [dead]
By seanhunter 2023-05-0212:282 reply Yes exactly it is obvious. The article attempts to address this by saying this effect is not the full story, which seems highly unconvincing to me. His argument is stripped of density, Manhattan is just another island like lots of islands in Maine that didn’t end up having very expensive real estate. But firstly lots of islands (eg Martha’s Harbour, Long Island, which isn’t really an island but close enough) in the area are significantly less dense and have very expensive real estate so I don’t think that argument bears any scrutiny at all.
In general his thought experiments with data in the article just seem completely handwavy. “Imagine if I added 5x more houses to Oakland”. Well we can imagine that but we would likely be wrong about what would happen so it didn’t prove anything. Besides anything the most likely outcome would be you would have a lot of empty houses.
By ghaff 2023-05-0212:56 Typically the building of housing and the use of land in fairly exclusive resort/beach/etc. communities is very tightly controlled. People in the Hamptons on the weekends don't want it to be another Manhattan. They already probably have a condo in Manhattan. Some real estate is desirable because of location (often beach/mountains) and community exclusivity--and often some degree of accessibility to wealthy population centers. (As you go up the Maine coast waterfront property is not necessarily outrageously expensive.)
By spacebanana7 2023-05-0212:52 > But firstly lots of islands (eg Martha’s Harbour, Long Island, which isn’t really an island but close enough) in the area are significantly less dense and have very expensive real estate so I don’t think that argument bears any scrutiny at all.
This really depends on how you measure real estate prices. Long Island can have very low price per square foot of ground land compared to Manhattan, even if the unit price of housing or price per square foot of interior space is similar.
By morsecodist 2023-05-0214:00 I like a lot of Scott's work but this is an uncharacteristically shallow analysis. On his chart he considers SF more dense than NYC, this is a misleading comparison. It seems like he is only considering the urban area in each metro, which totally misses the point. NYC is over 50% denser than SF and the surrounding metro area of NYC is nearly five times denser than that of SF. Yet on his first chart housing is significantly more affordable in NYC. I can't find good numbers quickly but having lived in both places and with quick spot-checking living in a denser suburb in the greater NYC area with a 20-30 minute train commute to downtown Manhattan is significantly more affordable than a similarly located apartment in the Bay Area. There is also some weirdness in comparing cities directly because NYC has absorbed a lot more of the surrounding area and is much larger than SF so comparing the two is not straightforward. This is just one data point swap but to me it calls the whole method into question, he even considers LA denser than NYC which is simply ridiculous.
A common YIMBY complaint is that single family zoning forces urban areas to become even denser because they are the only places where multi-family housing is allowed. This is totally consistent with the data presented here. Does that mean it is true? Not necessarily, but the analysis does little to explore options simply referring to the induced demand effect as "obvious". It seems he is out of his element here.
