Comment by cyberax | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cyberax | Hacker News Reader

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> Can you list some examples where a city has tried this and it failed?

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...

You raise reasonable points. It seems like a common trend is that housing prices go up anyway due to outside investors buying up property, high income workers moving in and wanting luxury apartments, etc.

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.

> You raise reasonable points. It seems like a common trend is that housing prices go up anyway due to outside investors buying up property, high income workers moving in and wanting luxury apartments, etc.

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.

Nah, I’m not convinced. All I’m convinced of is that you don’t like density, not that it isn’t part of the solution. You don’t get to tell everybody else what the options are.

Can you provide counter-examples for my points? Just one would suffice.

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.

The situation is way more complicated for every city you’ve mentioned than you let on.

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.

> The situation is way more complicated for every city you’ve mentioned than you let on.

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.

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