> but the mad-rush of millennials is making the city more and more unlivable
IMO, the problem is the policies of the city that are unfriendly to growth and make housing a zero sum game, the problem isn't than people expressing their preferences.
IMO, the problem is the policies of the city that are unfriendly to growth and make housing a zero sum game, the problem isn't than people expressing their preferences.
And about this time three years ago I was standing in an office in downtown Seattle and we could count fourteen cranes. There's still a lot of space for midrise buildings. I'm just not sure transportation is keeping up.
https://www.bizjournals.com/denver/maps/crane-watch
I keep wondering when the supply of 2k+/month shoddily constructed one bedroom rental apartments will catch up with the demand for them. That may not seem like a lot for the Bay types, but Denver has traditionally been a lot cheaper. The last 5-10 years have seen crazy population and rent growth.
Of course, everytime we go back to Seattle to visit the family we are reminded of what real heavy traffic looks like (though that still isn't anything like what LAs traffic look like where I once got into bumper to bumper traffic at midnight on a Sunday from Anaheim to Santa Clarita - now that is real traffic).
Remember: if housing is expensive, it must be because there aren't enough skyscrapers. There can be no other logical explanation.
I share the sentiment. I find it likewise amusing that the same crowd that argues that building additional highway capacity won't accomplish anything because it'll just get filled with more cars seems to think that additional housing capacity won't similarly be filled up immediately.
It will allow more people to commute into the city, which is the goal, right?
> seems to think that additional housing capacity won't similarly be filled up immediately.
And more people will be able to live there... Isn't that the goal?
Housing is boom/bust. Housing booms always attract dumb money and always bust.
So... it unlocked a whole bunch of housing supply? Sounds like a great policy!
The goal is "I want to be able to afford to live here." The only way to really affect prices is to absolutely flood the market with new housing. You can't just do it with a couple hundred units here, a couple hundred units there. Everyone in the world wants to live in SF, remember? They're just going to get snapped up and housing will still be expensive, the only real difference is that there's some more people living there now.
There's the Downs-Thomson paradox[1], which is usually quoted as adding capacity to highways to the road network will not reduce congestion, and the one I believe you mean. What the paradox actually states is that "the equilibrium speed of car traffic on a road network is determined by the average door-to-door speed of equivalent journeys taken by public transport." That is, as you add capacity to road networks, you disincentivize people from taking public transport, because the roads are quicker, until the two level out in terms of cost/benefit.
I'm not certain how directly applicable it is to the housing market. Essentially, what is the housing market's "public transport"? I suppose you could argue it's still public transit, since there is a trade-off between the more expensive, but closer housing and the cheaper but farther away public housing. But I'm also in favor (and I think most of the people in the HN SF crowd are) of better public transit in the Bay Area and better housing/zoning policy. (Either would help me and many others: a better public transit network would reduce the need for housing in cities closer & further up the Bay.)
There's also Jevons paradox[2], which says that when "technological progress increases the efficiency with which a resource is used (reducing the amount necessary for any one use), but the rate of consumption of that resource rises because of increasing demand." This is mostly concerned with reducing use of the resource though, and I fully expect that better zoning policy would result in more and cheaper housing, more use of said housing, and more demand — all in line with Jevons paradox, but none of which seems detrimental when compared to the current situation.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downs%E2%80%93Thomson_paradox
In transport, more roads means more capacity to carry traffic, and hence, more induced traffic. The death-spiral effect comes from the fact that each additional car on the road produces far more congestion than its operator alone experiences (negative externalities). True costs aren't born by the operator, so gridlock ensues.
For housing, or rather, urban development generally, the challenge is that denser cities with more inhabitants (generally) give rise to greater opportunity. This is where the action is, for whatever definition of action you have.
I'm not entirely sure what produces the death-spiral of cities pricing themselves out of their own housing markets, as SF is doing, but I'm inclined to think that the general trend of holders of investment assets to seek inflation of those assets' values is a key element. That is, you have a house, you've sunk a lot of money into it, you want its value to increase (hey! free money, right?). This turns into collaterisable assets for loans or other opportunities as well.
There's also the fact that high-value urban real-estate markets make for good options to bank wealth appropriated elsewhere, or for money-laundering. Values are high, tend to remain high, the market is liquid, and urban cores are far more stable for real estate prices than outlying areas. Hence, the housing stock value is bid up further.
Land value tax might help address that. Something I'm looking at. Originally suggested by Adam Smith and David Ricardo, though championed by Henry George.
Basically they had a problem of high value 'factories' being undeveloped since there was only opportunity costs associated with their not producing goods. Government rents were increased such that factories were only profitable for people utilizing them, and they saw a huge increase in total gdp.
I keep hearing that gaming comes up with interesting case studies, but rarely specifics such as this.
That's not quite how housing works. Yes, I suppose there's a broad supply-demand dynamic inasmuch as areas with more affordable house prices tend to see bigger houses and land parcels bought, but still, people don't just use more units of housing stock in response to a slightly less onerous housing crunch. If housing in the SF Bay area suddenly became more attainable, I wouldn't buy 3 apartments just 'cause.
The very wealthy will do it, of course, as they always have, and always will.
No, but you'd have all those people waiting on the sidelines jumping in immediately. Net result, housing is still expensive (sorta like the highway analogy, we still have tons of traffic after building these lanes).
But that's equally true of the highways too. If you widen a freeway, I'm not going suddenly commute to and from work an extra 3 times each day just 'cause.
> when you make driving easier or cheaper, people will do more of it because they can.
Not really, not anywhere near the amount people claim. This is a common misconception made by miscounting traffic on freeways past capacity. They mistake failed trips as non-existent ones, and then mistakingly claim "new traffic" was created when failed trips stop failing.
It's like saying "if you make hospitals easier or cheaper, people will get more sick because they can". You could even support that false claim, by measuring patients in hospitals. "We had a 100 bed hospital last year, and it was full. We built a second 100 bed hospital this year, and now it's full too. Clearly building hospitals is a bad idea, because it just makes more sick people".
This obviously isn't true, people were still sick before, they were miscounted because they weren't in the hospital (it was full). Just like how new freeways don't create new traffic, they serve existing traffic that was miscounted before because it wasn't on the freeway (it was full).
Yes, this! One thousand times this!
Either additional capacity helps service that need or it doesn't. You can't argue it both ways simultaneously. So many people want to pick and choose where they apply that logic, just to fit their political desires.
These two ideas are inherently contradictory, and it is an constant pet peeve of mine that most people refuse to recognize the contradiction.
The difference between housing and cars-on-the-road is that housing is generally seen as a positive thing that people get real value out of, whereas cars-on-the-road are an unfortunate side effect of people not having housing near where they live. We explicitly want fewer people to drive into our cities; on the contrary we want more people living in housing near where they want to be.
To put it another way, if you really think that building more housing will make things worse, then why not argue for the destruction of existing housing stock to make things better?
Or do you think we're at a peak, where we have built just the right amount of housing and we should just leave it alone? I guess there probably is some amount that's just right for each city, though I have no idea what we'd have to look at to figure out that number.
I don't personally believe that. I think capacity solves shortage needs, consistently. But most don't.
Most people really believe your reasoning is valid, and they advocate for the exact destruction you've mentioned (see "Road Diets" / freeway removal / any article from CNU / etc).
> The difference between housing and cars-on-the-road is that housing is generally seen as a positive thing that people get real value out of, whereas cars-on-the-road are an unfortunate side effect of people not having housing near where they live
I think most people agree with you, but I personally believe this is a very dystopian view. Transportation is an inherently positive thing too, that real people get real value out of. Even if every single human lived right next to their work place, it's still a good thing that people have fast reliable easy freedom of movement in whatever method they prefer.
Even if you live right next to your workplace, your next job won't be. Your spouses job, or next job, won't be. Your parent's home won't be, your children's school won't be. Unless your constantly moving every 2 years, this idea of "transportation is just a bad side effect of not living inside your workplace" doesn't really hold up to regular life, in my opinion.
Fewer believe that people-living-in-homes is bad.
Both are laughably wrong.
I'm not arguing against development, I just think a lot of the pro-development folks imagine that cities are making things zero sum with their policies, when real property will always have that element.
That's not what we should be striving for. We should be striving to allow people to comfortably live and work outside of just downtown Manhattan. The biggest obstacles to that are zoning laws and a decrepit subway system that makes traveling between boroughs outside of Manhattan practically impossible.
Better public transportation would also relieve pressure on the city center.
That's more like a symptom.
Policies are shaped by people and people are motivated by forces. The motivating force in this case is probably money. There are lots of people who make money off real-estate and they're motivated to keep supply down to drive up costs. What better way than by influencing public policy to suit their agenda.
If you try to change city policy to make housing affordable then you're basically declaring war on a very influential portion of the population that has a lot to lose.