Well written and fairly convincing. Slightly off topic but the side point about highway capacity expansion projects interests me. I’m guessing it won’t be popular. But it’s true that more people are traveling and choosing to travel despite the congestion. I’ve never heard the urbanists so quick to dismiss such projects address these points.
The issue from an urbanism perspective is not really that highways fill up immediately.
The problem is generally selling capacity expansion as "reducing congestion" when it does nothing of the sort. That, and the capacity gets used so quickly that you are very quickly spending yourself into a hole trying to build ever more highway capacity. The thing about a train is that it's very hard to make it so crowded the service degrades due to congestion, at least not within the first 20-50 years.
This black hole of money needed for highway congestion then starts pulling away from other municipal and transportation funding needs.
It'd be interesting to think about ways we could implement congestion control on highways .. every thread I've read implicitly assumes it's not possible
But that's true of public transit projects too. They always promise to reduce congestion and never actually do. Congestion charging is probably the only way to really reduce congestion and in many ways the solution is worse than the problem.
And, more than not being a problem, the highway filling up immediately is actually a benefit. Because more people are able and are choosing to travel, to accomplish whatever they need and want to accomplish.
Granted, the externality costs of all that car travel are high. But that's almost a separate issue and one that we really should be solving by a better accounting of costs and additional taxes. It's a shame that won't happen.
It doesn’t reduce road congestion but it does reduce transit congestion. The Second Avenue Subway, for example, decreased loads on the parallel congested Lexington Avenue line by 11%: https://www.6sqft.com/in-just-a-month-second-avenue-subway-e.... It’s displaced 88,000 trips a day, and yet it’s not anywhere near full; a highway expansion would struggle with that amount.
Traffic speeds generally have a floor of how long the equivalent public transport journey is. (If the public transport journey is faster, people will use that instead.) The issue now is that American land use is so out of whack it’s hard to deploy transit widely enough to make that true for the majority of trips.
I think you're on to something with regards to subways in urban environments moving a number of people that a highway expansion would struggle to match. Feels to me like movement of people should be the real metric and, given that, that we should be prioritizing transit investments in places like NYC, San Francisco, and West LA (as opposed to light rail to Azusa).
Downs-Thomson Paradox is also interesting here and relates to your second paragraph. In a built out environment, transit trips and car trips will take roughly the same amount of time, door to door. Transit advocates have used that finding as a way to complain about road projects, but I think it actually is a much more interesting finding that suggests a more multi-modal approach to planning. I wonder how relevant or irrelevant it is for non-built-out environments.
In the US at least, really the complaint from transit advocates is that funding is and continues to be overwhelmingly road-centric, with a small share for transit and basically a pittance for walking and biking.
Usually the issue with suburban transit investment occurring over urban ones is that urban areas are so weak they cannot fund expansions by themselves, and if you want the suburbs to pony up they’ll get their pound of flesh
The problem of the highway expansion is not damage done by the highway, or that the highway itself doesn't increase value for land far away: It's that the very subsidized highway later gives us horribly inefficient land uses which don't pay for themselves.
So yes, the widening of the highway makes the suburb more valuable, but the second effects make the city spend more resources on parking and makes the streets worse for anyone nearby. It's no picnic for the suburb either: A car-centric infrastructure basically bans anything else. That would be fine and all, if ultimately it produced more value than the alternatives. But look at the parking lots that were designed to never get completely full on black friday, back when it was actually a time where people did local shopping. Nowadays it's all wasted infrastructure, expensive to redevelop. If you thought that the commercial real estate office in dense cities was in trouble, don't look at the one in suburbs.
So it isn't really the highway, but all the things that relying on the highway leads to.
Not to mention how loud highways are. A concrete freeway generates enough noise at rush hour to make conversation impossible a quarter mile away. Nobody who lives nearby spends any time outside.
Urbanists don't like highways because highways are generally sold to the public as a way to reduce congestion; what usually happens is the extra lanes fill up immediately. The capacity of a train is much larger and it's a lot cheaper to increase throughput on a train line (by running more trains, longer trains, etc) than it is on a highway.
Urbanists disagree that more VMT is inherently good. VMT is good because of why people make trips - see their family, go to work, shop etc.
The alternative isn't eliminating those trips. It's taking the trillions of dollars we waste and spending it on an alternative, more efficient modes that deliver better outcomes (travel time, cost, speed, comfort, etc)
I agree that VMT is good because of why people make those trips. If you're saying spending all that money on public transit would be a better way to help more people make more of those trips, then you'd be unequivocally wrong in much of the US. Go to someplace like Dallas and marvel at the nearly empty buses and light rail run cars. Maybe we could focus on dramatically improving public transit in someplace suitably dense like West LA. If only the politics allowed it.
Most people don't object to increasing rural highway capacity. However, the increased traffic has to go somewhere, and nobody likes busy streets in their neighborhood. Not in the suburbs, and not in the city. People generally want less traffic in their area, not more.
Urbanists tend to prefer walkable cities. They want to use less above-ground space for traffic and parking, leaving more space for buildings, parks, and public squares. Highway capacity expansions work against that, because they encourage more people to drive into the city.
Urbanists don't view the fact that more people are choosing to travel as good, because of the destructive effects of that travel (noise, pollution, parking, etc.)
I've lived in European cities and American cities. American cities are more car centric and its actually more convenient. Many cities in Europe are so congested and difficult to drive but its by design rather than a bug - it means people are more likely to get trains to get out of town. I do see that more roads encourages more cars and driving, I've found it to be a good thing.
Car dependency generally results in negative health outcomes though.
* driving is just less healthy than walking, biking, or walking to and from public transport
* driving causes high noise pollution and emissions; EVs will solve the latter but not the former, since above low speeds most of the noise is tires rolling against roads
* increased driving in the US has led to higher fatality rates for the people still walking and biking
* increased driving leads to lower funding levels for other types of transport since road infrastructure is so expensive, and not everybody can afford a car to avoid getting left behind
Sure Manhattan is expensive but you can easily find a 2 bedroom in Jackson Heights for under $300k and still take the F train to work in the city. In the Bay Area that price point will have you on the freeway 4+ hours every day.
>you can easily find a 2 bedroom in Jackson Heights for under $300k
I agree with your overall point, but home prices are somewhat misleading in NYC. The "affordable" places tend to have lots of fees. That $300k 2b in Jackson Heights that's within walking distance to a subway line is probably going to have a $900 HOA.
HOAs in CA are frequently above $500, so the $900 HOA won’t skew the payment that much, plus you also have to account for amenities included in the HOA. CA HOA amenities tend to be fairly light and building/lot maintenance focused.
Ooh, we are talking about appartments, not houses ! Makes more sense.
I'm not from the US and I thought the HOA were only these evil organization that control the color of your paint and the height of your lawn, paying that much for these felt very wrong. In the context of an appartment building it's different (although still super expensive !).
They are the same. The HOAs exist to maintain the housing and its market value. You are not paying them to act as hall monitors. That is a by product. You are paying them to fix things when they break.
You’re not comparing like for like. You might as well say, if you want a 2000sqft detached house within a 30 minute commute in the Bay Area you could do so for under 2 million there and it cost hundreds of millions in Manhattan.
Like-for-like: "within a 30 minute commute" would include areas outside of Manhattan. https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/187-Cambridge-Ave-Jersey-... is $774,000, 2,000 sq. ft., has something resembling a yard, and is a 22-minute drive to central Manhattan.
Houston isn't weighed down by the income of tech workers and lawyers, Austin is. You can build all the housing you want but if people working at the grocery store are competing with tech workers, and at some point you're having to commute labor in, the costs of everything will continue to rise.
They're competing with tech workers because there isn't enough housing. If you "build all the housing you want" then there's enough for both groups of people and you don't get a competition where the grocery workers lose out.
For context, I'm from Dallas. The same thing happened there. What were affordable apartments and starter homes went up in price as businesses consolidated there with high paid workers. The metroplex has worked to expand to all available land and yet they still struggle to make houses and apartments affordable.
Extraordinary claims like putting something in air quotes that I didn't say are just flat out ignorant.
If you look at the table the cost of homes quadrupled over a period where inventory rose substantially. There are incentive systems at play with residences and those incentive systems go far beyond just inventory counts and density is my point.
~7000 available listings for 54,000 new residents doesn’t exactly sound like “plenty of inventory”. Do people usually live 7-up in Austin? That’s a lot of roommates …
This is a terrible analysis. As long as houses are still selling for above the cost of materials and construction, there is not enough housing supply.
There aren’t enough tech workers to buy 500,000 $1m homes. So keep building homes until the prices drop to $200k and then maybe there is enough supply.
Anytime people have to “compete” for housing, there isn’t enough.
> So keep building homes until the prices drop to $200k
It is difficult to build a house for less than 200K these days in any dense urban area, so expecting prices to drop to that level is fairly unrealistic unless you're way out in the boonies.
> Anytime people have to “compete” for housing, there isn’t enough.
Builders don't build houses for fun, they do it as a for-profit business. If there is not enough demand for housing in a given area to drive prices up to a sufficient profit, they just won't build anything there.
Builders have no motivation to keep building until prices drop. They want to build wherever prices remain high enough to make a decent profit.
Based on housing prices in rural areas (where land is effectively free, $10k or less for a buildable plot with power and sewage access) the cost to build a detached single-family home is somewhere around 350k. Could you build something cheaper? Almost certainly, but the people who can afford to buy a new home don't want something that is bare-minimum contractor-grade.
In the past this was naturally handled by older housing being "handed down" to people as starter homes, etc; but that cycle has been disrupted in many areas.
I find this article to be embarrassingly bad. Just find metro areas and compare neighborhoods and observe density levels, and see the effect on price.
The author clearly has an agenda and basically wrote the article around it. Why all the conjecture?
I was bored so I did a very crude estimate.
Houston has 982,694 homes according to the census data in 665 square miles.
Austin has 426,899 homes in 271 square miles.
So Austin is denser and more expensive. To me this makes sense. Denser areas are more popular, and popularity results in high income people coming in and biding up prices. This is why there are no dense areas that are cheap.
The article isn't great but your analysis is probably worse.
No per Capita analysis? No income analysis? Only two cities?
This is actually a challenging question to answer. Thankfully other people have done research and we can reference that if we actually want to know the answer, rather than just prove our priors to ourselves.
Land is going to be expensive in popular areas, but dense housing means that you can get a lot more housing on the same land, so you can still contain prices, even if they're probably not going to be super low.
I would argue Eugene’s market is heavily influenced by Nike and UOregon (and recently remote worker flight from downtown Portland) and as such, drawing a line directly from its lack of density to lack of affordability strains credulity for me.
This relationship between density and cost reverses for nearby towns like Springfield even though they share many of Eugene’s characteristics.
> I find this article to be embarrassingly bad. Just find metro areas and compare neighborhoods and observe density levels, and see the effect on price.
This sketch of an analysis is significantly worse than what's in the article. You can't estimate effects by correlating levels. You need to correlate deltas, at minimum. You also need a reason to think those deltas are causally linked, in that you're not suffering from omitted variable bias, which is why you need a natural experiment. The article follows this correct methodology by discussing the Austin natural experiment.
Trickle down is a completely different thing: the idea was to give wealthy people extra cash and hope some of it came to the rest of us.
Supply and demand is pretty basic, apolitical economics, but it is true that if there's a shortage, it's going to hit hardest those with less money.
Which means we should aim for an abundance of necessary goods like housing and food. We should do that by building both more market rate and subsidized housing in the places people want to live.
> give wealthy people extra cash and hope some of it came to the rest of us
Is letting them run hog wild through our cities replacing neighborhoods with luxury high rises for foreign investors any different?
Obviously we could always use more updated housing in urban areas, but you are either stupid or acting like it when you pretend the argument is not about who should be building that housing and whether anyone should profit from owning it.
Everyone, notice the rhetorical sleight of hand operating here. An apartment, perhaps with 2 bedrooms, that costs significantly less than a "modest" or "quaint" single detached house in the same locale is labelled "luxury". That labelling scheme is chosen in order to persuade by way of demonization. But such labelling never gets applied to houses. Three bedroom houses that cost more than 99.9% of all apartments in existence, including the majority of apartments that are labelled as "luxury", never themselves carry the label "luxury". Instead they get endearing labels like "family home". These are the rhetorical tricks that NIMBYs use to push their political agenda to weaponize government in order to ban poor people and keep the price of their house high.
The luxury label is used by the developers themselves to market their product, whether it be newly built apartments or houses. How can that be a trick by NIMBYs?
Everyone knows that luxury means “new”, or at best, “shiny stainless steel appliances and quartz countertops”. The fact that it is new, and so has to comply with the most updated standards, is probably the most luxury aspect of all since materials and connections and whatnot have improved.
This designation of new and old is more important in the apartment market than house markets because apartments tend to get neglected by landlords, whereas houses either get updated or can be updated by the owner.
Also, in the case of houses, where a lot more money and due diligence is required, simply using luxury to describe them is insufficient, and not very useful to sell new housing developments.
It's a rhetorical device that carries no substance, whether it happens to be NIMBYs using it as a political weapon to demonize, or developers using it to sell a product.
However, I am going to focus criticism on NIMBYs when they are doing it, since they are the ones being dishonest and hypocritical when they only apply such labels to apartments. At least if a developer/agent was to try to sell a house, they'd try to find similar flowery language in order to market it, instead of only singling out apartments for that treatment in order to push their damaging political agenda.
It's a bit apples to oranges, sure, but you're still sitting on a pile of money and bearing few of the direct costs of it in places like OR or CA with screwy property taxes. You can borrow against it or sell and go elsewhere, which is a lot better place to be in than someone wishing to purchase and seeing the value of a home go up more than they make in a year.
The gains are not wiped out, they're just not liquid.
We bought our first house about seven years ago and are about to sell it. The house appreciated almost 75% over that span of time. We bought a new house in the same price range. I'm just transferring the appreciation of the the first house to the second house. But since it's a higher real dollar amount, I was able to put a much higher percentage down on the new house and get a better total cost of the loan as a result. I still have all of the gains I made, even if they're locked in equity in the house, and was able to leverage them for additional value in reduced interest paid. Because I had more equity from the first house, it also made it easier for me to outbid other bidders, because I didn't have the same debt-to-income constraints they did.
Even if the gains aren't liquid, homeowners gain at the expense of non-homeowners.
It’s money you can access if you need it. It’s a capitalized loan, so no matter what, it’s a better deal than you’d get if you were pulling the money from a credit card as an example.
Need to pay for your child’s tuition? Start a business? Unexpected major expenses? You have a relatively cheap line of credit compared to every other option on the market.
That’s still wealth no matter how you slice it. And, not even that long ago, that was wealth people could access for almost nothing, who knows what the interest rate environment will be in 5 years.
>Trickle down is a completely different thing: the idea was to give wealthy people extra cash and hope some of it came to the rest of us.
Trickle down is a political label used by people to attack policies they don't like by claiming a policy helps wealthier people at the expense of less wealthy people.
Saying it's simply a label for attack ignores the real issues surrounding the economic philosophy underpinning it which has resulted in massive increases in wealth for the top, especially the top 0.1% at the expense of the bottom 80+%. Society has suffered and watched their incomes and life decline since the implementation of "Reaganomics" or "Trickle-down economics". Communities have declined, due to tax changes which overwhelmingly benefit the super rich, while wages, job security, housing, virtually everything of the average person has been degraded.
Trickle down economics seems to have been a failure. I would agree about that.
But that's not the mechanism we're talking about with housing at all.
What we're talking about with housing is that there are 5 houses and 10 people, and in that kind of scarcity environment, 5 people are going to lose out. In most cases, it's going to be the 5 people with the least money.
But even if you do a lottery or something else, 5 people are still going to lose out and that's bad.
>Saying it's simply a label for attack ignores the real issues...
As the wikipedia article says, "trickle down" is a political term. Any proposed tax policy deserves real debate on the pros and cons - using political terms like "trickle down" (or for that matter terms like "tax and spend", "bleeding heart" etc.) are not done to help advance the debate. They aren't trying to advance an argument - they are trying to shut down debate. People who use political terms like that are usually trying to either poison the well or are creating a straw man.
isn't it a slippery slope though??
You have to just keep adding supply but unfortunately the amount of living space that can be built in an urban area is constrained at some point both vertically and horizontally.
So if you add a ton of houses you have the same problem just many years later but now everyone is living in a massive overcrowded area. Adding supply seems to just be postponing the problem.
The real solution imo is to spread out the jobs to other areas so that these major urban areas aren't the only places people have to move to find work.
There's tons of gorgeous places between the coasts that wonderful to live but there's no jobs.
>The real solution imo is to spread out the jobs to other areas so that these major urban areas aren't the only places people have to move to find work.
While that definitely works whenever doable, I'd say investing in much better infrastructure to reduce commuting time and complexity is the other big factor. Living far away from the workplace isn't a biggie if I can take for example a train and be there in a reasonable amount of time. For sure an expensive solution but a solution that will pay off nevertheless.
> Isn't it a slippery slope though?? You have to just keep adding supply but unfortunately the amount of living space that can be built in an urban area is constrained at some point both vertically and horizontally.
You're absolutely right. There's definitely real limits, vertically and horizontally, to how much density is physically possible.
As an upper limit, we have good historical examples density of around 1.2 million people per square kilometer being workable. I don't think any part of the US today comes close to that - what data I can find says that the most densely populated part of the US is at 66,000 people per square km. That's multiple orders of magnitude different.
With that in mind, I think it's possible that we haven't yet hit any real physical or space-based limits in American cities. Only political ones.
Kowloon Walled City made it to 1.9 million people per km².
Your list of cities misses this because it's comparing entire metropolitan regions (not clear how this is precisely defined), as opposed to neighborhood-level densities, which is where you can get the hundreds of thousands or millions of people per km².
It housed 33,000 people. While on paper that's extremely dense it's not necessarily scalable - and kind of provably so, since they tore it down and evacuated everyone who lived there.
What would the sewage infrastructure look like for a 1km square with almost two million people in it? How about the ventilation? Police and fire? It's not really tenable.
Tore it down against the will of the people living there. And the building height was constrained by an overhead airport approach. KWC could have been even denser. I don't think going full KWC density is a good idea, but comparisons to it serves as a rough measure of how far from "full" a city really is. And I think it's important to remind ourselves of that from time to time.
SF, to pick an example near and dear to HN readers, is not full. All residents of the Bay Area could fit between Market Street and Van Ness Avenue with lots of room to spare.
not that i disagree, but could you elaborate on that please?
as one commenter suggested, the problem is that job locations are too concentrated. we have already proven that remote work is effective, so there is no need for that any more, and super high density is not necessary.
the environmental issue with low density is mostly cars, which can be solved with good public transport, which btw will also be needed in super high density areas because people will also want to go out of the city some times.
i also believe that environmental friendly construction affects the possible density a city can have. concrete is not exactly environmental friendly material. (for high density steel without concrete would be better, it's more lightweight too, so allows for higher buildings)
in short, there are a lot of factors that go into environmental friendly living. what are the factors that favor high density?
This paper goes into great detail about how urban households have lower emissions than suburban ones.[0] This is made up of the different energy, transportation, food, goods, and services emissions of the different lifestyles associated with each area. For instance, going beyond transportation, climate control for buildings is one of the top uses of energy. Detached single-family homes are pretty must worst case, compared to attached housing, or even multi-story apartments, etc.
First, only some jobs can be done efficiently in a remote way. We should not be in a rush to generalize this to every job.
Second, public transit can be more energy and cost-efficient when in a denser context. In addition to public transit, there's also cargo transport for things like food, which given dense areas can be handled by more carbon efficient methods like water and rail instead of trucks. We haven't even touched on the efficiencies for water, sewer, and electrical infrastructure.
Third, dense construction can be done with timber. We've now reached a point technologically where a 100m building can be constructed primarily out of wood (search "plyscraper"). Wood is a very ecologically friendly material, as using it means capturing carbon.
Fourth and finally, building up instead of sprawling out means less deforestation, less draining wetlands, and less paving over prairies.
In short there are a lot of factors that go into environmentally friendly living, and most of them favor higher density.
cargo transport for things like food, which given dense areas can be handled by more carbon efficient methods like water and rail
i am skeptical about that. at least with the existing huge high density cities like those in china. less density (well, actually small islands of high density, in relation to your point four) would allow space for local food production. and truck vs train is not a factor of distance. if anything longer distances are more efficient by train and water whereas the last mile likely will remain with trucks (which could be electric though)
i agree with the other points, and i wasn't aware that wood construction went that far already.
capturing carbon
coincidentally i was just listening to a german audiodrama about capturing carbon.
There's a density limit on carbon neutral housing, you can't scale vertically and lower carbon impact. IIRC it's something like after 3 stories you need to scale horizontally for solar power to offset the carbon impacts of powering the pumps for water/sewage, elevators, and additional concrete required for foundations.
So it's not necessarily dense that's the most environmentally friendly.
You have to account for the cost of transportation as well, though. The more density you have, the more you will be able to walk to most destinations and the more cost-effective public transport gets.
Sure, but what I'm saying is that it's not as simple as a function that moving people closer together is infinitely scalable to lessen our impact on the environment. There's no free lunch.
That's why I think upzoning to medium density 15-minute cities is the best of both worlds.
Not to mention that living in a dense urban environment has a worse quality of life for a lot of people - that's why people don't want to do it. They like the space.
Thing is, North American cities are so spread out that even 3 stories would be close to an order of magnitude of improvement.
Imagine if no zoning code could prevent a developer from creating up to 3 story, multi-unit buildings on standard quarter acre lots. Just that alone would more than double the density in the United States overtime and still give most people PLENTY of space before we even have to start making sacrifices
You're right, forcing people everyone shoulder the financial burden of maintaining a motor vehicle, forcing them to engage in one of the most dangerous activities humans can engage in and forcing every possible place they might want to visit to have a spare 158sqft is much better.
I'm as density-friendly as it comes, but I think that we'd be much better off at maximum 20,000/sq km or so.
(That's not a magic number - that's about the density of the city of Paris, ignoring inner ring and outer ring. That's average across Paris, mind you, not some absolute maximum.)
Oakland is 3,000ish per sq km, for reference. Now, I'd prefer that we don't have to live in the 400 sq ft/40 sq meters kind of options that are older Parisian apartments, and I think that proper sound insulation is ground stakes (which current 5 over 1s in America don't do a great job with) but I think we can make the argument of more density without pushing for the extreme argument here.
It'd be amazing if we got to Paris style density in half of the top 20 cities in the US. I just haven't seen great ideas or plans to transform the heavily car dependent sun belt cities into denser places.
Maybe but you’ve gotta consider that a lot of people want to live in say Denver or Dallas because they aren’t dense. If I wanted a New York City or San Francisco type of lifestyle I’d move to one of those places. If the demand was there, less dense places will become more dense naturally without ideas or schemes to force it.
Soundproofing hasn't historically been a part of US building codes is why it's not done here. California added an optional Soundproofing part of the code but cities must opt into it. Oakland is actually one of the few cities in California which has.
I do agree that decentralizing the jobs is a really good thing. But while people want to cram into the same area, the government should not fight them.
Look at San Jose Diridon Station. Caltrain and links to Oakland and San Francisco go through it. It is in the middle of Silicon Valley and yet the station is empty during the day surrounded by parking lots.
No - the low hanging fruit is that ~40%+ of most American cities are dedicated to cars (parking & roads) and another ~20% to yards.
When you consider that airports & parks & golf courses take up a considerable amount of space - you're down to <10% of the city (proper) dedicated to space people actually live in.
And that's often times single story - with no vertical use whatsoever.
> isn't it a slippery slope though?? You have to just keep adding supply but unfortunately the amount of living space that can be built in an urban area is constrained at some point both vertically and horizontally.
That's not a slippery slope though, it's an eventual limit that you might hit some day. If adding housing now is a win, add the housing. It makes people better off today.
Denser housing tends to be more efficient in a lot of ways, so it's better if your concern is for the environment. People living in denser housing also tend to have an easier time of walking or biking to things, which is also better for the environment.
Or standing in a very crowded platform waiting for the subway, where subsequently you're standing with an armpit in your face and someone's backpack poking into your back.
That happens because increasing housing density, as long as it takes to build, is rapid compared to increasing public transportation. Not everyone can bike or walk to work in big cities, especially when the subway commute is 45 minutes.
> So if you add a ton of houses you have the same problem just many years later but now everyone is living in a massive overcrowded area.
Why would those areas be overcrowded instead of just appropriately dense? The suburbs, for example, are under crowded and that's a huge problem.
> The real solution imo is to spread out the jobs to other areas so that these major urban areas aren't the only places people have to move to find work.
I completely agree with the general theme here. I was hoping remote work would have a larger impact here than it has but alas major tech companies can't get away from a few select cities.
But I would just say that in the spirit of spreading things out we should be mindful to not spread too much. Farmland should stay farmland, forests should stay forests or areas that were previously home to dwindling populations of humans should return to nature. Appropriate levels of urban density (walkable neighborhoods, you can keep your car and your SFH still) should be the goal because it solves a lot of problems. We already have a model for cities that has lasted for thousands of years. It works because it's based on human evolution. I have yet to see a model that deviates from this that is successful.
> You have to just keep adding supply but unfortunately the amount of living space that can be built in an urban area is constrained at some point both vertically and horizontally.
In cases like NYC/SFO I do think that's a problem. As you build more it actually has the unique phenomenon of becoming more expensive because you have to buy land, you have to build the building, and you have to attract tenants that can afford to pay for those things + your profit. And naturally you aren't going to lower rent on your existing places because that contradicts any reason to build new units. This isn't an absolute truth, but I think New York City proves the point. If you could just add supply to lower prices, New York would be much cheaper than, say, Columbus or Pittsburgh.
> Why would those areas be overcrowded instead of just appropriately dense? The suburbs, for example, are under crowded and that's a huge problem.
Why is that such a problem though. As suburbs become denser, exurbs form. There is always going to be a huge chunk of the population that don’t want density but also don’t want rural life and since there is demand, the market will create supply especially since it is usually cheaper and easier to build on empty fields than in a dense area.
Basically because you're not accounting for all of the costs (nor are they). Sure it may be the case that it's cheaper to build on an empty lot, but what is the cost of the forest that was cut down, or the farmland that was supplanted? Now instead of getting blueberries from within a 5-10 mile radius grown by a local farmer who has a job, those same blueberries have to be shipped in from Chile.
You're also not accounting for the infrastructure costs. Here's a recent example [1]. The state of Missouri is allocating $2.8 billion to expand a highway. Why do they(we) need to expand a highway? Well, because people want to live in the suburbs and drive their cars everywhere so now we have to pay to do that. Obviously there is some utility to highways and cars for that matter, but we don't need as many highways or to spend as much trying to maintain or build them if we don't use them as much. They're also one of those projects that have a big number so useless bureaucrats really like them because it's easy to do and nobody complains about it too loudly even though there's almost certainly rampant fraud and corruption in every state department of cars or equivalent.
What other costs are there? Well, pollution. That's an easy one. Energy - we have to go fight wars and stuff to secure oil and other energy supplies (whether it's our own or policing the world to ensure that container ships get from A -> B). It takes a lot of energy to move a 200lb human 3 miles down the road in a 3,000 lb SUV to get a loaf of bread or a couple of apples or whatever.
What about health and wellbeing? Well, it's easy to hate people when you sit inside your house all day glued to Facebook and don't go anywhere. It makes people crazy. We're also fat. Like really, really fat. Is it our diet? Nah not really. Certainly that's a factor but otherwise relatively healthy people are overweight because they get little exercise compared to people in peer countries. Why don't they get exercise? Because they live in a house, drive a car everywhere, and get maybe 1,000 steps each day unless they dedicate time to working out.
What about costs to your community? Well, it's hard for a small coffee shop or grocery store to compete with the likes of Starbucks or Giant Eagle. Why is that? Well how can they compete when Starbucks sets up a drive-through and can crank out 5 lattes/minute? They can't buy and build real estate. Entrepreneurship numbers go down too and all the money you spend on your car, tires, Starbucks, California grown tomatoes (nothing wrong with that besides negative externalities), and leave your local community and flow to where the companies producing these products are headquartered.
So when we say "it's cheaper and easier to build in empty fields" you are certainly correct in the short term. But in the long term it makes us poor, costs us our natural beauty, and destroys our livelihoods.
Now you might say, but hey I don't want to live in "some shoebox apartment and ride the bus everywhere" and I would say hell yea me either and thankfully that's not a choice we need to make. You can live in a normal SFH, or an apartment, or a duplex, or a townhome. You can have a garage, or park your car on the street. You don't have to ride the bus, but we can make the bus services work well so that you have options depending on what activities you are participating in. And we can do all of this by making changes to zoning and how we build. We can have our cake and eat it too. Instead, we choose not to because we're held captive by bureaucrats and vested interests that make a profit off of our fat assess, our water and soil, and are happy to be taking the welfare checks we depend on because the jobs moved away and nobody can start a business anymore because there's nowhere to start one.
Externalities are already priced in using existing NEPA/CEQA/environmental legislation, some would say absurdly highly. Almost everyone who advocates for infill development along with continued exurban development is also a fan of accounting for externalities while building. There's plenty of the US where there's low productivity grasslands where it's fine to build but as you say there are also several delicate ecologies out there that need preserving.
The existing regulatory landscape already accounts for this in many places. That's what California's CEQA is all about. I'm a fan of infill development along with available exurbs but I'm also a fan of taxing or blocking externalities and if you feel there's a gap where you live, I highly recommend lobbying your local government to add legislation around curtailing externalities.
The negative externalities aren’t priced in. That’s just a simple fact. If they were then gas would be $20+ per gallon and we wouldn’t have most of the population suffering from obesity. Cities like Columbus wouldn’t have 200+ acres of surface parking lots (most American cities suffer from the same problem).
You can tell that the externalities aren’t priced in because the problems they cause continue to stay the same or get worse (obesity, coral reefs dying, car crashes killing kids and stuff).
Then go and advocate for that if you want that to happen. As someone who does advocate, I think pricing externalities is infinitely better than how CEQA works but CEQA is much more palatable to the electorate than pricing externalities.
So fix MTA. Their system expansion budget is currently $15B/year, so at the costs of a low-wage, low-regulation, totally ununionized country like (checks notes) Norway, they could be building 60 km of new lines per year.
Just like that we'll fix the MTA with the wave of a hand. The MTA that spent billions and a decade for a couple of stations. In a mono party City/State where unions are tied to the party machine. Good luck.
Agglomeration is important to our economy. Forcing people into Fordlandia does not work and trying to would destroy our ability to compete on the world stage.
Scott Alexander's argument is correct. 'Building more' likely means building outwards. This means the existing expensive , dense metro areas remain expensive due to scarcity, demand ,and good paying jobs. The newer construction is cheaper but not as desirable. If single family homes were replaced with dense, ugly condos then maybe he would be wrong.
Building outwards can be dense, also; if you have an existing mass transit rail line that goes into a city, you can build a new "suburb" around a station that itself is quite dense and still have easy access to the city.
But the vast majority of people in the United States, if given the choice, will pick a single-family home over a condo/apartment.
In the 1910s when Manhattan's population was 2.3 million, price per square foot (PPSF) was $8. In the 2010s when the population was 1.6 million PPSF was $1070.
Inflation from the 1910s to the 2010s was about 22x. PPSF in Manhattan rose by 134x over the same time, even as the population fell.
I agree that real estate is complex and simply plotting density vs price along any dimension isn't very useful. My analysis is as complex as Scott Alexander's and arrives at the opposite conclusion.
This article does not make sense to me. City's main point of attractiveness is high density. When you have a place with lots of resources ( usually near rivers ) people will move there. The more people, the more business which means if there's any place for any nice market then hitting the biggest cities first is a good bet. Yes, this means the more houses you build in an area, the more people will move there which will increase the attractiveness of a city. Attractiveness can be represented as value. This, in no way means you should stop building houses in places that are the most attractive. Quite the opposite. Build until the price drops or the cost of even higher density outstrips the benefit that could be gained. Eventually too many people will be priced out. You might not like the idea that only the very rich can occupy the highest value spot in a city but thats just free market.
"They added two more lanes to the freeway, but the traffic is worse than ever.” But that’s a wonderful result"
No, its not. Thoughput is a function of speed * vehicles. Having a 6 lane highway at a crawl is as effective as a single lane highway at decent speed. Induced demand is complicated to grasp but the core is that highways are terrible at moving lots of people and any additional highway will make more people drive to match the highway's new capacity. A neverending traffic loop. Trains, trams, buses and cyclepaths all move more people which should be prioritised. Many countries atleast have priority for buses which makes them a better option. Most american cities treat them like another car but with lower status.
Exactly. That's why tram+bike combo in Netherlands is so effective. People travel big distance by train and small distance to work, home and shops. Since trams are very efficient at moving a lot of people car congestion will be reduced. If number of people using trams increases more than their capacity, surprise, you can add another section without hiring one more driver. So big capacity transport that can be adapted to demand and that has priority on the road(it's own lane) and is frequent enough basically can satisfy most of the traffic human needs
The scaling curve of a tram or bus is very different than for cars. A bus takes up about as much room as 3 cars and holds up to 200 passengers. The typical car at rush hour has 1 passenger.
You can pack a lot of buses onto a bus lane. Trains and trams scale even better because you can expand the same vehicle by adding more sections.
An articulated bus can officially carry 120 passengers[0]. With regards to road space used, 3 SUVs with normal following distance would be approximately the length of the bus, or longer. An articulated bus is about 19m, while an SUV is about 4.5m.[1]
The official capacity of the busses in my city is 52 seated and 94 standing. They frequently go way over capacity during rush hour, so around 180 passengers definitely isn't unreasonable. While not quite as much as the person you were replying to claimed, it still illustrates the point.
This could be, but usually public transport is more effective. Eg. A Bus can transport 4-8 more people, than a car for the same space used on the streets. This rate is even more increased with trains or trams. Therefore people need to demand 4-8 times more public transport than with cars to equalize the effects.
This holds true as long as the population is constant, becaus a single human can not spend an indefintly amount of time in public transport.
If the population can increase eg. Housing Markets in cities, this wont work. If you could double or quadruple the amount of available houses instantly the demand would also go up after some time…
Yes, the main benefit of trains and proper buses is that you wont get stuck in traffic. So in the worst case scenario you'll see troughput increases as a function of ridership (more occupancy, more trains) while trying to battle overcrowding. By adding more trains and buses. Trains have another benefit to the population that they can travel at higher speed, so the induced demand with trains can get even higher because of the large distance you can travel if you travel at 200+ kmph.
Induced demand isn't actually a bad thing unless your transportation gets less efficient the more people use them. Which is definitely the case with cars. Just look at the amount of parking spaces needed to cope with peak hours. This can all be avoided if trains and buses are a viable and comfortable option for people.
Just think about the average car ridership only having 1.2 passengers. While a bus that takes up three parking spaces can have 50-100 people. Or a train that could hold up to 1500 passengers.
> any additional highway will make more people drive to match the highway's new capacity.
If you build a 6 lane highway in Alaska, it's not going to get traffic. Induced demand is really supressed demand; people avoid trips because the cost in time is too high, increasing throughput allows more trips to be made at the same time cost, and so more trips are made.
But, if you look at Caltrans reports before and after highway widening, there's usually a decrease in the hours of congestion. At least until population growth overcomes the increased capacity. Mass transit can certainly move more people per vehicle and that can make more throughput, but it also limits the viable trips. If you loom at somewhere like the LA area, it's hard to live near where you work, especially if you have two workers in the household or you change jobs. Some routes have mass transit options, but a lot of commutes would take all day without a car; especially if the commute is at off hours.
The myth of induced demand needs to die a short and painless death. The confusion between something at capacity being expanded and the expansion itself causing the increase is too prevalent.
Okay then figure out another term to explain why bumping Katy Freeway up to 28 lanes is not going to fix Houston's traffic problem.
The real explanation is more subtle which is that sure, you can just keep adding freeway until there's no traffic, but it's actually bad to have monster 30+ lane highways running through the middle of your cities.
It's not a cute name, but you can't measure actual demand when you're at capacity --- maybe hidden demand, unmeasured/unmeasurable demand. But population growth is often ignored too --- if your metro is growing rapidly, and your road expansion project takes several years and traffic 'is the same' after construction, that's actually a successful project; if the expansion didn't happen, traffic would most likely be much worse.
Think of a webserver with a 100M link; if it's at capacity all day long, you know you should upgrade the link, but should you add a second link so you get 2x100M, or does it need 1G or 10G or more? Hard to say. If your 100M link is only at capacity for a few minutes or even an hour a day, adding another link is likely to be enough. Of course, network capacity is easier to add than road capacity.
I understand all this, the only bit relevant to the point is “network capacity is easier to add than road capacity.”
That is why people disparagingly call unmet demand for roads “induced demand,” because it makes it clear it will be very difficult to just more-roadway your way to low traffic.
Ok, the problem with the nomenclature is it sounds like the demand for trips just magically appear when the road does. If you don't want to satisfy the demand for trips with additional road capacity, that's fine; additional road capacity is expensive, but then so are most forms of additional trip capacity, but using a misleading term to defend the choice is not a great way to do it.
You probably wouldn't be happy saying we shouldn't build additional housing in (wherever is housing capacity limited) because it will just induce demand for housing and it will still be capacity limited. Certainly, you'd need to build a lot of housing in San Francisco or New York or lots of metros to satisfy the unmet demand for housing and unless/until you build enough, housing will still be a congested resource, but there's no inducement; same thing with roads.
At some point, if you're not going to build housing and you're not going to build transportation (whether that's roads or rails or bike paths or flying carpets or whatever), you need to have a real coming to terms of this metro is full and how do we manage its population in a reasonable and fair manner.
Building a large supply of high-rise apartments can certainly decrease prices... see e.g. downtown Chicago which has cycles of over-building apartments resulting in lower rents, then waiting for rents to rise before building more.
If there is less housing, people will have fewer children. If there is more housing, people will have more. Building more houses, in the long term, just results in breeding a larger population of people. And for what? To cover the entire world in concrete and shoot emissions through the roof? At some point, we need to stop building. We need to live sustainably. The world cannot support an infinite number of people with a high quality of life.
You have false premises. Building a lot doesn't result in breeding and higher density can be better for environment. Look at Russia's and China's multifloor buildings but population in that regions decreases because it looks like s*t(hello urban planning) and look at Netherlands where ~5-10 floor buildings are a norm and they get a lot of people and still due to efficient transportation and planning, their emissions are much less compared to low density cities in US where everybody should move by car even for grocceries(and thats despite bad weather with a lot of wind and rain that imo is worse for bikes than some hills that are not a problem because of e-assist)
I think there are many examples for induced demand for apartments: People definitely move to get a few minutes closer to work, get a bigger apartment, or just to be closer to friends and family. That means, they will indeed come if you build it.
In my view, housing problems are a function of ever denser cities. It's clear that we can stuff an immense amount of humans into a single square kilometer, but there has to be a downside. That downside is the fact that demand will usually be much higher than supply. If that wasn't the case, we couldn't convince so many people to live so close to each other in the first place.
But it has the benefit of lifting pressure on house prices in many other locations. Many cities sprawl in extremely inefficient ways as they attempt to accomodate excessive demand, while apartments etc are much cheaper on a societal level in the long term.
Until someone understands the distorting effect of "bonus depreciation" which was added to the tax regs in 2017, and adjusts for that in their article, I view it with skepticism.
Since buildings were and are not eligible for bonus depreciation, nor is land, how do those tax changes in 2017 TCJA affect urban density and home prices?
So you go over the property and you say that interior property items like stove, fridge, molding, other improvements (not repairs) are separate items from the real estate. For instance, "kitchen $20,000" -this can now be written off immediately. To my mind it explains partially the luxury condo drive... the bonus depreciation is in those luxury parts which can be broken out and depreciated 100% in the first year of ownership.
Arguing about housing economics with entrenched opinions is essentially pointless. It’s like arguing about evolution against intelligent design.
Nobody can make a controlled test to demonstrate millions of years of macro evolution, or to demonstrate the effects of housing policy on home prices. Smaller controlled tests or past observations are all explained away by countless confounders.
All that we’re left with is partisan bickering.
It’s up to you to decide whether your opinion on housing economics is like evolution or like intelligent design.
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[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 235 ms ] threadThe problem is generally selling capacity expansion as "reducing congestion" when it does nothing of the sort. That, and the capacity gets used so quickly that you are very quickly spending yourself into a hole trying to build ever more highway capacity. The thing about a train is that it's very hard to make it so crowded the service degrades due to congestion, at least not within the first 20-50 years.
This black hole of money needed for highway congestion then starts pulling away from other municipal and transportation funding needs.
And, more than not being a problem, the highway filling up immediately is actually a benefit. Because more people are able and are choosing to travel, to accomplish whatever they need and want to accomplish.
Granted, the externality costs of all that car travel are high. But that's almost a separate issue and one that we really should be solving by a better accounting of costs and additional taxes. It's a shame that won't happen.
Traffic speeds generally have a floor of how long the equivalent public transport journey is. (If the public transport journey is faster, people will use that instead.) The issue now is that American land use is so out of whack it’s hard to deploy transit widely enough to make that true for the majority of trips.
Downs-Thomson Paradox is also interesting here and relates to your second paragraph. In a built out environment, transit trips and car trips will take roughly the same amount of time, door to door. Transit advocates have used that finding as a way to complain about road projects, but I think it actually is a much more interesting finding that suggests a more multi-modal approach to planning. I wonder how relevant or irrelevant it is for non-built-out environments.
Usually the issue with suburban transit investment occurring over urban ones is that urban areas are so weak they cannot fund expansions by themselves, and if you want the suburbs to pony up they’ll get their pound of flesh
So yes, the widening of the highway makes the suburb more valuable, but the second effects make the city spend more resources on parking and makes the streets worse for anyone nearby. It's no picnic for the suburb either: A car-centric infrastructure basically bans anything else. That would be fine and all, if ultimately it produced more value than the alternatives. But look at the parking lots that were designed to never get completely full on black friday, back when it was actually a time where people did local shopping. Nowadays it's all wasted infrastructure, expensive to redevelop. If you thought that the commercial real estate office in dense cities was in trouble, don't look at the one in suburbs.
So it isn't really the highway, but all the things that relying on the highway leads to.
The alternative isn't eliminating those trips. It's taking the trillions of dollars we waste and spending it on an alternative, more efficient modes that deliver better outcomes (travel time, cost, speed, comfort, etc)
Urbanists tend to prefer walkable cities. They want to use less above-ground space for traffic and parking, leaving more space for buildings, parks, and public squares. Highway capacity expansions work against that, because they encourage more people to drive into the city.
* driving is just less healthy than walking, biking, or walking to and from public transport
* driving causes high noise pollution and emissions; EVs will solve the latter but not the former, since above low speeds most of the noise is tires rolling against roads
* increased driving in the US has led to higher fatality rates for the people still walking and biking
* increased driving leads to lower funding levels for other types of transport since road infrastructure is so expensive, and not everybody can afford a car to avoid getting left behind
Sure Manhattan is expensive but you can easily find a 2 bedroom in Jackson Heights for under $300k and still take the F train to work in the city. In the Bay Area that price point will have you on the freeway 4+ hours every day.
I agree with your overall point, but home prices are somewhat misleading in NYC. The "affordable" places tend to have lots of fees. That $300k 2b in Jackson Heights that's within walking distance to a subway line is probably going to have a $900 HOA.
With shared ownership models, you typically pay into a shared pool that can be drawn from to pay for maintenance needs.
I'm not from the US and I thought the HOA were only these evil organization that control the color of your paint and the height of your lawn, paying that much for these felt very wrong. In the context of an appartment building it's different (although still super expensive !).
LOL. That's some of the faintest praise I have ever heard.
No, I don't have an example of a reasonably priced detached single family home in NYC near a subway stop.
With the exception of 2021 and part of 2022 Austin has had plenty of inventory.
Texas A&M actually has really good research data on this: https://www.recenter.tamu.edu/data/housing-activity/#!/activ...
For context, I'm from Dallas. The same thing happened there. What were affordable apartments and starter homes went up in price as businesses consolidated there with high paid workers. The metroplex has worked to expand to all available land and yet they still struggle to make houses and apartments affordable.
Extraordinary claims like "supply and demand don't actually apply to housing" require extraordinary proof.
If you look at the table the cost of homes quadrupled over a period where inventory rose substantially. There are incentive systems at play with residences and those incentive systems go far beyond just inventory counts and density is my point.
About 54,000 people have moved to Austin (or been newly born) in 2023. https://www.macrotrends.net/cities/22926/austin/population
~7000 available listings for 54,000 new residents doesn’t exactly sound like “plenty of inventory”. Do people usually live 7-up in Austin? That’s a lot of roommates …
There aren’t enough tech workers to buy 500,000 $1m homes. So keep building homes until the prices drop to $200k and then maybe there is enough supply.
Anytime people have to “compete” for housing, there isn’t enough.
It is difficult to build a house for less than 200K these days in any dense urban area, so expecting prices to drop to that level is fairly unrealistic unless you're way out in the boonies.
> Anytime people have to “compete” for housing, there isn’t enough.
Builders don't build houses for fun, they do it as a for-profit business. If there is not enough demand for housing in a given area to drive prices up to a sufficient profit, they just won't build anything there.
Builders have no motivation to keep building until prices drop. They want to build wherever prices remain high enough to make a decent profit.
In the past this was naturally handled by older housing being "handed down" to people as starter homes, etc; but that cycle has been disrupted in many areas.
That cycle is what urban economists call 'filtering'. It's like used cars that lose value over time.
The disruption is a severe housing shortage so that even older housing starts getting more expensive and sometimes quite rapidly.
The author clearly has an agenda and basically wrote the article around it. Why all the conjecture?
I was bored so I did a very crude estimate.
Houston has 982,694 homes according to the census data in 665 square miles.
Austin has 426,899 homes in 271 square miles.
So Austin is denser and more expensive. To me this makes sense. Denser areas are more popular, and popularity results in high income people coming in and biding up prices. This is why there are no dense areas that are cheap.
No per Capita analysis? No income analysis? Only two cities?
This is actually a challenging question to answer. Thankfully other people have done research and we can reference that if we actually want to know the answer, rather than just prove our priors to ourselves.
Let's look at the prices in Chicago, which is a pretty dense place: https://www.realtor.com/realestateandhomes-search/Chicago_IL... - $350K
Now let's look at the fairly bland, suburban college town where I grew up, which is not dense: https://www.realtor.com/realestateandhomes-search/Eugene_OR/... - $495K!
Eugene is far more expensive than the dense place with a lot of amenities and jobs.
This relationship between density and cost reverses for nearby towns like Springfield even though they share many of Eugene’s characteristics.
This sketch of an analysis is significantly worse than what's in the article. You can't estimate effects by correlating levels. You need to correlate deltas, at minimum. You also need a reason to think those deltas are causally linked, in that you're not suffering from omitted variable bias, which is why you need a natural experiment. The article follows this correct methodology by discussing the Austin natural experiment.
* https://cayimby.org/its-only-a-housing-market-if-you-can-mov...
* https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/articles/...
* https://kevinerdmann.substack.com/p/we-need-affordable-housi...
Just off the top of my head.
Edit: Wow, some of the comments here are like exhibit A for Jerusalem Demsas' piece on how housing breaks people's brains:
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/11/us-housing... - "Supply skepticism and shortage denialism are pushing against the actual solution to the housing crisis: building enough homes."
Supply and demand is pretty basic, apolitical economics, but it is true that if there's a shortage, it's going to hit hardest those with less money.
Which means we should aim for an abundance of necessary goods like housing and food. We should do that by building both more market rate and subsidized housing in the places people want to live.
Is letting them run hog wild through our cities replacing neighborhoods with luxury high rises for foreign investors any different?
Obviously we could always use more updated housing in urban areas, but you are either stupid or acting like it when you pretend the argument is not about who should be building that housing and whether anyone should profit from owning it.
Everyone knows that luxury means “new”, or at best, “shiny stainless steel appliances and quartz countertops”. The fact that it is new, and so has to comply with the most updated standards, is probably the most luxury aspect of all since materials and connections and whatnot have improved.
This designation of new and old is more important in the apartment market than house markets because apartments tend to get neglected by landlords, whereas houses either get updated or can be updated by the owner.
Also, in the case of houses, where a lot more money and due diligence is required, simply using luxury to describe them is insufficient, and not very useful to sell new housing developments.
It's a rhetorical device that carries no substance, whether it happens to be NIMBYs using it as a political weapon to demonize, or developers using it to sell a product.
However, I am going to focus criticism on NIMBYs when they are doing it, since they are the ones being dishonest and hypocritical when they only apply such labels to apartments. At least if a developer/agent was to try to sell a house, they'd try to find similar flowery language in order to market it, instead of only singling out apartments for that treatment in order to push their damaging political agenda.
Uh... existing homeowners are the ones making bank hand over fist thanks to the housing shortage:
https://oregoneconomicanalysis.com/2021/03/16/who-benefits-f...
We bought our first house about seven years ago and are about to sell it. The house appreciated almost 75% over that span of time. We bought a new house in the same price range. I'm just transferring the appreciation of the the first house to the second house. But since it's a higher real dollar amount, I was able to put a much higher percentage down on the new house and get a better total cost of the loan as a result. I still have all of the gains I made, even if they're locked in equity in the house, and was able to leverage them for additional value in reduced interest paid. Because I had more equity from the first house, it also made it easier for me to outbid other bidders, because I didn't have the same debt-to-income constraints they did.
Even if the gains aren't liquid, homeowners gain at the expense of non-homeowners.
Need to pay for your child’s tuition? Start a business? Unexpected major expenses? You have a relatively cheap line of credit compared to every other option on the market.
That’s still wealth no matter how you slice it. And, not even that long ago, that was wealth people could access for almost nothing, who knows what the interest rate environment will be in 5 years.
Trickle down is a political label used by people to attack policies they don't like by claiming a policy helps wealthier people at the expense of less wealthy people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trickle-down_economics
But that's not the mechanism we're talking about with housing at all.
What we're talking about with housing is that there are 5 houses and 10 people, and in that kind of scarcity environment, 5 people are going to lose out. In most cases, it's going to be the 5 people with the least money.
But even if you do a lottery or something else, 5 people are still going to lose out and that's bad.
Build more housing.
As the wikipedia article says, "trickle down" is a political term. Any proposed tax policy deserves real debate on the pros and cons - using political terms like "trickle down" (or for that matter terms like "tax and spend", "bleeding heart" etc.) are not done to help advance the debate. They aren't trying to advance an argument - they are trying to shut down debate. People who use political terms like that are usually trying to either poison the well or are creating a straw man.
So if you add a ton of houses you have the same problem just many years later but now everyone is living in a massive overcrowded area. Adding supply seems to just be postponing the problem.
The real solution imo is to spread out the jobs to other areas so that these major urban areas aren't the only places people have to move to find work.
There's tons of gorgeous places between the coasts that wonderful to live but there's no jobs.
While that definitely works whenever doable, I'd say investing in much better infrastructure to reduce commuting time and complexity is the other big factor. Living far away from the workplace isn't a biggie if I can take for example a train and be there in a reasonable amount of time. For sure an expensive solution but a solution that will pay off nevertheless.
I mean does anyone want to take a train 2 hours both ways to get to work?
We just need good jobs/offices available in other regions.
None of these things are mutually exclusive.
You're absolutely right. There's definitely real limits, vertically and horizontally, to how much density is physically possible.
As an upper limit, we have good historical examples density of around 1.2 million people per square kilometer being workable. I don't think any part of the US today comes close to that - what data I can find says that the most densely populated part of the US is at 66,000 people per square km. That's multiple orders of magnitude different.
With that in mind, I think it's possible that we haven't yet hit any real physical or space-based limits in American cities. Only political ones.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_world_cities_by_popula... only goes up to about 80 thousand ... and the city with the highest population density in that list is one I must admit I'd never heard of, so there's a pub trivia question, perhaps.
More realistically, we can see examples of nice residential neighborhoods in Washington DC ranging from 30,000-100,000+/km2. [1]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kowloon_Walled_City
[1] https://ggwash.org/view/42469/what-do-80000-people-in-a-squa...
[1] https://youtu.be/y3XoUBzfXps?t=453
Your list of cities misses this because it's comparing entire metropolitan regions (not clear how this is precisely defined), as opposed to neighborhood-level densities, which is where you can get the hundreds of thousands or millions of people per km².
What would the sewage infrastructure look like for a 1km square with almost two million people in it? How about the ventilation? Police and fire? It's not really tenable.
SF, to pick an example near and dear to HN readers, is not full. All residents of the Bay Area could fit between Market Street and Van Ness Avenue with lots of room to spare.
as one commenter suggested, the problem is that job locations are too concentrated. we have already proven that remote work is effective, so there is no need for that any more, and super high density is not necessary.
the environmental issue with low density is mostly cars, which can be solved with good public transport, which btw will also be needed in super high density areas because people will also want to go out of the city some times. i also believe that environmental friendly construction affects the possible density a city can have. concrete is not exactly environmental friendly material. (for high density steel without concrete would be better, it's more lightweight too, so allows for higher buildings)
in short, there are a lot of factors that go into environmental friendly living. what are the factors that favor high density?
[0] https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/es4034364
good point.
i live in an area where climate control is not needed at all, so that changes the equation considerably here.
First, only some jobs can be done efficiently in a remote way. We should not be in a rush to generalize this to every job.
Second, public transit can be more energy and cost-efficient when in a denser context. In addition to public transit, there's also cargo transport for things like food, which given dense areas can be handled by more carbon efficient methods like water and rail instead of trucks. We haven't even touched on the efficiencies for water, sewer, and electrical infrastructure.
Third, dense construction can be done with timber. We've now reached a point technologically where a 100m building can be constructed primarily out of wood (search "plyscraper"). Wood is a very ecologically friendly material, as using it means capturing carbon.
Fourth and finally, building up instead of sprawling out means less deforestation, less draining wetlands, and less paving over prairies.
In short there are a lot of factors that go into environmentally friendly living, and most of them favor higher density.
i am skeptical about that. at least with the existing huge high density cities like those in china. less density (well, actually small islands of high density, in relation to your point four) would allow space for local food production. and truck vs train is not a factor of distance. if anything longer distances are more efficient by train and water whereas the last mile likely will remain with trucks (which could be electric though)
i agree with the other points, and i wasn't aware that wood construction went that far already.
capturing carbon
coincidentally i was just listening to a german audiodrama about capturing carbon.
Suburban houses require more resources and energy to build, maintain, heat/cool. Transport is just a small part of it.
So it's not necessarily dense that's the most environmentally friendly.
That's why I think upzoning to medium density 15-minute cities is the best of both worlds.
Not to mention that living in a dense urban environment has a worse quality of life for a lot of people - that's why people don't want to do it. They like the space.
Imagine if no zoning code could prevent a developer from creating up to 3 story, multi-unit buildings on standard quarter acre lots. Just that alone would more than double the density in the United States overtime and still give most people PLENTY of space before we even have to start making sacrifices
I'm as density-friendly as it comes, but I think that we'd be much better off at maximum 20,000/sq km or so.
(That's not a magic number - that's about the density of the city of Paris, ignoring inner ring and outer ring. That's average across Paris, mind you, not some absolute maximum.)
Oakland is 3,000ish per sq km, for reference. Now, I'd prefer that we don't have to live in the 400 sq ft/40 sq meters kind of options that are older Parisian apartments, and I think that proper sound insulation is ground stakes (which current 5 over 1s in America don't do a great job with) but I think we can make the argument of more density without pushing for the extreme argument here.
I do agree that decentralizing the jobs is a really good thing. But while people want to cram into the same area, the government should not fight them.
Let's fix the low hanging fruit.
When you consider that airports & parks & golf courses take up a considerable amount of space - you're down to <10% of the city (proper) dedicated to space people actually live in.
And that's often times single story - with no vertical use whatsoever.
That's not a slippery slope though, it's an eventual limit that you might hit some day. If adding housing now is a win, add the housing. It makes people better off today.
« Actual solution » as in temporary - good enough for now, not as sustainable - can work and scale for tomorrow ?
Houses needs lots of time, energy and material to be build. Let’s not « market » them as they were plastic bags.
Denser housing tends to be more efficient in a lot of ways, so it's better if your concern is for the environment. People living in denser housing also tend to have an easier time of walking or biking to things, which is also better for the environment.
That happens because increasing housing density, as long as it takes to build, is rapid compared to increasing public transportation. Not everyone can bike or walk to work in big cities, especially when the subway commute is 45 minutes.
https://bettercities.substack.com/p/americas-infrastructure-...
Why would those areas be overcrowded instead of just appropriately dense? The suburbs, for example, are under crowded and that's a huge problem.
> The real solution imo is to spread out the jobs to other areas so that these major urban areas aren't the only places people have to move to find work.
I completely agree with the general theme here. I was hoping remote work would have a larger impact here than it has but alas major tech companies can't get away from a few select cities.
But I would just say that in the spirit of spreading things out we should be mindful to not spread too much. Farmland should stay farmland, forests should stay forests or areas that were previously home to dwindling populations of humans should return to nature. Appropriate levels of urban density (walkable neighborhoods, you can keep your car and your SFH still) should be the goal because it solves a lot of problems. We already have a model for cities that has lasted for thousands of years. It works because it's based on human evolution. I have yet to see a model that deviates from this that is successful.
> You have to just keep adding supply but unfortunately the amount of living space that can be built in an urban area is constrained at some point both vertically and horizontally.
In cases like NYC/SFO I do think that's a problem. As you build more it actually has the unique phenomenon of becoming more expensive because you have to buy land, you have to build the building, and you have to attract tenants that can afford to pay for those things + your profit. And naturally you aren't going to lower rent on your existing places because that contradicts any reason to build new units. This isn't an absolute truth, but I think New York City proves the point. If you could just add supply to lower prices, New York would be much cheaper than, say, Columbus or Pittsburgh.
Why is that such a problem though. As suburbs become denser, exurbs form. There is always going to be a huge chunk of the population that don’t want density but also don’t want rural life and since there is demand, the market will create supply especially since it is usually cheaper and easier to build on empty fields than in a dense area.
You're also not accounting for the infrastructure costs. Here's a recent example [1]. The state of Missouri is allocating $2.8 billion to expand a highway. Why do they(we) need to expand a highway? Well, because people want to live in the suburbs and drive their cars everywhere so now we have to pay to do that. Obviously there is some utility to highways and cars for that matter, but we don't need as many highways or to spend as much trying to maintain or build them if we don't use them as much. They're also one of those projects that have a big number so useless bureaucrats really like them because it's easy to do and nobody complains about it too loudly even though there's almost certainly rampant fraud and corruption in every state department of cars or equivalent.
What other costs are there? Well, pollution. That's an easy one. Energy - we have to go fight wars and stuff to secure oil and other energy supplies (whether it's our own or policing the world to ensure that container ships get from A -> B). It takes a lot of energy to move a 200lb human 3 miles down the road in a 3,000 lb SUV to get a loaf of bread or a couple of apples or whatever.
What about health and wellbeing? Well, it's easy to hate people when you sit inside your house all day glued to Facebook and don't go anywhere. It makes people crazy. We're also fat. Like really, really fat. Is it our diet? Nah not really. Certainly that's a factor but otherwise relatively healthy people are overweight because they get little exercise compared to people in peer countries. Why don't they get exercise? Because they live in a house, drive a car everywhere, and get maybe 1,000 steps each day unless they dedicate time to working out.
What about costs to your community? Well, it's hard for a small coffee shop or grocery store to compete with the likes of Starbucks or Giant Eagle. Why is that? Well how can they compete when Starbucks sets up a drive-through and can crank out 5 lattes/minute? They can't buy and build real estate. Entrepreneurship numbers go down too and all the money you spend on your car, tires, Starbucks, California grown tomatoes (nothing wrong with that besides negative externalities), and leave your local community and flow to where the companies producing these products are headquartered.
So when we say "it's cheaper and easier to build in empty fields" you are certainly correct in the short term. But in the long term it makes us poor, costs us our natural beauty, and destroys our livelihoods.
Now you might say, but hey I don't want to live in "some shoebox apartment and ride the bus everywhere" and I would say hell yea me either and thankfully that's not a choice we need to make. You can live in a normal SFH, or an apartment, or a duplex, or a townhome. You can have a garage, or park your car on the street. You don't have to ride the bus, but we can make the bus services work well so that you have options depending on what activities you are participating in. And we can do all of this by making changes to zoning and how we build. We can have our cake and eat it too. Instead, we choose not to because we're held captive by bureaucrats and vested interests that make a profit off of our fat assess, our water and soil, and are happy to be taking the welfare checks we depend on because the jobs moved away and nobody can start a business anymore because there's nowhere to start one.
[1] Karrot_Kream ↗ Externalities are already priced in using existing NEPA/CEQA/environmental legislation, some would say absurdly highly. Almost everyone who advocates for infill development along with continued exurban development is also a fan of accounting for externalities while building. There's plenty of the US where there's low productivity grasslands where it's fine to build but as you say there are also several delicate ecologies out there that need preserving. ericmay ↗ The negative externalities aren’t priced in. That’s just a simple fact. If they were then gas would be $20+ per gallon and we wouldn’t have most of the population suffering from obesity. Cities like Columbus wouldn’t have 200+ acres of surface parking lots (most American cities suffer from the same problem). Karrot_Kream ↗ Then go and advocate for that if you want that to happen. As someone who does advocate, I think pricing externalities is infinitely better than how CEQA works but CEQA is much more palatable to the electorate than pricing externalities.
The existing regulatory landscape already accounts for this in many places. That's what California's CEQA is all about. I'm a fan of infill development along with available exurbs but I'm also a fan of taxing or blocking externalities and if you feel there's a gap where you live, I highly recommend lobbying your local government to add legislation around curtailing externalities.
You can tell that the externalities aren’t priced in because the problems they cause continue to stay the same or get worse (obesity, coral reefs dying, car crashes killing kids and stuff).
If the entire US lived at the population density of Manhattan, everyone would fit in 4500 sq miles, which is only seven times the size of Houston.
Just let people build dense housing in the places where people want to live. There is no realistic possibility of running out of space.
Federal, state and local spending in the US on roads adds up to around a quarter of a trillion dollars per year.
Agglomeration is important to our economy. Forcing people into Fordlandia does not work and trying to would destroy our ability to compete on the world stage.
https://www.sightline.org/2023/02/07/yes-oregon-there-is-a-w...
But the vast majority of people in the United States, if given the choice, will pick a single-family home over a condo/apartment.
I found this neat article https://millersamuel.com/change-is-constant-100-years-of-new...
In the 1910s when Manhattan's population was 2.3 million, price per square foot (PPSF) was $8. In the 2010s when the population was 1.6 million PPSF was $1070.
Inflation from the 1910s to the 2010s was about 22x. PPSF in Manhattan rose by 134x over the same time, even as the population fell.
"They added two more lanes to the freeway, but the traffic is worse than ever.” But that’s a wonderful result"
No, its not. Thoughput is a function of speed * vehicles. Having a 6 lane highway at a crawl is as effective as a single lane highway at decent speed. Induced demand is complicated to grasp but the core is that highways are terrible at moving lots of people and any additional highway will make more people drive to match the highway's new capacity. A neverending traffic loop. Trains, trams, buses and cyclepaths all move more people which should be prioritised. Many countries atleast have priority for buses which makes them a better option. Most american cities treat them like another car but with lower status.
You can pack a lot of buses onto a bus lane. Trains and trams scale even better because you can expand the same vehicle by adding more sections.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/99_B-Line#:~:text=It%20is%20....
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nova_Bus_LFS
This holds true as long as the population is constant, becaus a single human can not spend an indefintly amount of time in public transport.
If the population can increase eg. Housing Markets in cities, this wont work. If you could double or quadruple the amount of available houses instantly the demand would also go up after some time…
Induced demand isn't actually a bad thing unless your transportation gets less efficient the more people use them. Which is definitely the case with cars. Just look at the amount of parking spaces needed to cope with peak hours. This can all be avoided if trains and buses are a viable and comfortable option for people.
Just think about the average car ridership only having 1.2 passengers. While a bus that takes up three parking spaces can have 50-100 people. Or a train that could hold up to 1500 passengers.
If you build a 6 lane highway in Alaska, it's not going to get traffic. Induced demand is really supressed demand; people avoid trips because the cost in time is too high, increasing throughput allows more trips to be made at the same time cost, and so more trips are made.
But, if you look at Caltrans reports before and after highway widening, there's usually a decrease in the hours of congestion. At least until population growth overcomes the increased capacity. Mass transit can certainly move more people per vehicle and that can make more throughput, but it also limits the viable trips. If you loom at somewhere like the LA area, it's hard to live near where you work, especially if you have two workers in the household or you change jobs. Some routes have mass transit options, but a lot of commutes would take all day without a car; especially if the commute is at off hours.
The real explanation is more subtle which is that sure, you can just keep adding freeway until there's no traffic, but it's actually bad to have monster 30+ lane highways running through the middle of your cities.
Think of a webserver with a 100M link; if it's at capacity all day long, you know you should upgrade the link, but should you add a second link so you get 2x100M, or does it need 1G or 10G or more? Hard to say. If your 100M link is only at capacity for a few minutes or even an hour a day, adding another link is likely to be enough. Of course, network capacity is easier to add than road capacity.
That is why people disparagingly call unmet demand for roads “induced demand,” because it makes it clear it will be very difficult to just more-roadway your way to low traffic.
You probably wouldn't be happy saying we shouldn't build additional housing in (wherever is housing capacity limited) because it will just induce demand for housing and it will still be capacity limited. Certainly, you'd need to build a lot of housing in San Francisco or New York or lots of metros to satisfy the unmet demand for housing and unless/until you build enough, housing will still be a congested resource, but there's no inducement; same thing with roads.
At some point, if you're not going to build housing and you're not going to build transportation (whether that's roads or rails or bike paths or flying carpets or whatever), you need to have a real coming to terms of this metro is full and how do we manage its population in a reasonable and fair manner.
In my view, housing problems are a function of ever denser cities. It's clear that we can stuff an immense amount of humans into a single square kilometer, but there has to be a downside. That downside is the fact that demand will usually be much higher than supply. If that wasn't the case, we couldn't convince so many people to live so close to each other in the first place.
Nobody can make a controlled test to demonstrate millions of years of macro evolution, or to demonstrate the effects of housing policy on home prices. Smaller controlled tests or past observations are all explained away by countless confounders.
All that we’re left with is partisan bickering.
It’s up to you to decide whether your opinion on housing economics is like evolution or like intelligent design.