For example - SF's row houses. You can't build anything like those due to rules about stairs, environmental laws about multiple family dwellings with internal stairs, and building codes that have such strict environmentally friendly rules that people cannot afford to live indoors.
Up here in Seattle I was inquiring about extending my roof out to convert my cape code into a salt shaker style house, basically giving me two more bedrooms on the same lot. From an environmental perspective this is great, my house is over 70 years old, it is a sunk cost in terms of building material, and it was already updated with modern insulation years ago. I had an energy assessment done with I first moved in, and basically was told there isn't much I can do except fix the duct work but sadly no one does duct work anymore (I tried to find someone!)
So anyway, my roof extension? The city would want me to replace my roof with larger wood so I could put in more insulation. An expensive undertaking that would have ZERO benefit to the house's energy profile. If they wanted me to paint the roof white, sure, that'd make sense and help more than $30k extra of roof work.
Another example is how the electrical code keeps getting more and more strict, such as having outlets every few feet in kitchens. That adds a lot to costs, with little to no benefit. If you add up all the incremental safety rules since the 90s, we're paying a ton for a very very small margin of improvement in safety.
And none of these rules are making houses better! "Home inspector discovers entire subdivision has leaking walls" is an entire sub-genre of video on YouTube.
So we're paying a lot small things we don't need (kitchens with a dozen outlets, AFCI breakers everywhere, 30k of lumber to save $5 a month on cooling) while the important things (walls that don't leak) are being ignored.
Hence why we are down to moving outlets over a inch every version
> Why Can’t American Cities Build 3-Flats Anymore?
Not Tokyo, not Moscow, not Austin.
First one I clicked, $600 a month
https://suumo.jp/chintai/jnc_000099304610/?bc=100450374320
I can find cheaper
Please don't cross into personal attack. Your comment would be just fine without that bit.
For comparison, Seattle WA has a minimum wage around 2.5x higher than Tokyo. Here is a larger apartment [2] that is only 1.33x more expensive than your Tokyo broom closet.
Go ahead and find something more akin to the American sized apartments (500sq+ for 1 bd) and you'll see that the prices are almost the same, with much lower wages across the board.
[1]: https://kb.nkba.org/2016/11/new-nkba-research-defines-averag... [2]: https://www.apartments.com/amherst-micro-studios-seattle-wa/...
As a result, the US also doesn't have such a collapsing population as Japan.
All while just 3 hours away by car, beautiful houses are crumbling into dust. You literally can get them for the price of the land tax, and there are even companies that specialize in finding them.
Any questions?
Math has to take into account that if 30k people want to move to a city, and you build 40k houses ( to drop prices), well now maybe 50k people want to move to the city and prices will still go up!
If you create the regulatory climate that allows the market to provide housing, you can probably absorb a few tens of thousands of people over a few years. Most of these places don’t do that at all, other than Austin.
You're pointing yourself at a graph that shows an exponential spike in prices up until 2023, just as my model of density-price death spiral predicts.
And the only reason the prices stopped growing is the population _decrease_ after COVID lockdowns. The ACS data series ( https://data.census.gov/table/ACSST5Y2020.S0101?q=Austin,+TX ) gives 979,263 people in 2019, and by 2023 it recovered to 979,200 after falling to 944,658 in 2021.
So no, Austin has not managed to lower prices by building more. It managed to do that by using a worldwide pandemic that lowered the city population.
And yes, lowering the population is the only way to lower the housing cost. You don't have other options.
Build more houses per year than people who want to move to the city. Prices will decrease.
NYC did this over 100 years ago, it became one of the world's most important cities.
SF did the same thing, it became a tier 1 world city.
Same for Chicago.
Then they stopped doing it.
Then no other city in America even bothered trying.
Also housing prices don't go down immediately with new construction, there is a latency. More so, sometimes prices just stabilize, but if prices stay the same for 5 years, and inflation and wages go up, that means the effective price of housing went down. If you keep building and prices stay the same for a decade, all of a sudden houses are affordable.
SF
No, they won't. For the same reason adding a lane to a busy freeway doesn't increase the traffic speed.
https://www.texastribune.org/2025/01/22/austin-texas-rents-f...
> A massive apartment building boom in the Austin-Round Rock region has driven rents downward, real estate experts and housing advocates have said.
Why do you even think this?
The evidence is screaming that we are clearly in a massive housing shortage.
No, they don't. They got a one-time pause in the price growth from a _falling_ overall population. Here's the price chart for housing in Austin: https://imgur.com/a/WzauEIp
The population has either not yet recovered, or it has just recovered to the peak 2019 level. I have conflicting data. But nevertheless, once it comfortably passes the 2019 peak, the prices will continue growing.
Because it's not possible. Large cities can't sustainably grow at more than single digit percentage per year speed.
And at that speed, the density/price death spiral easily consumes all the housing.
Seattle was mentioned here, and it grew its number of housing units by 25% over 12 years. Oftentimes leading the country in the number of active cranes.
Can you guess what happened with housing costs? I give you three guesses.
> Since if prices never fall or never even rise slower we clearly can make infinite wealth?
No. You get the fall of democracy, demographic collapse, and in general other nasty consequences when the bill comes due.
Because it's essentially a zero-sum game now. The population growth has mostly ended, so every new dense housing unit in NYC means a new abandoned house in rural Ohio.
Want a stat that will blow your mind? The US has 1.1 housing units per family. We literally have more houses than families in the country. Yet somehow it's a "housing crisis".
https://coloradosun.com/2025/04/26/apartment-rents-denver-fa...
Next "example", please.
Edit: as expected, the reason for the price pause is the falling population. https://data.census.gov/table/ACSST1Y2019.S0101?q=Denver,+CO
2019 - 727211
2021 - 711463
2023 - 716577
More and more data seem to confirm my points.