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Great question. In theory, jobs put an upper limit on housing usage. People almost always follow jobs. There are many beautiful cities in the world but only S
by inputcoffee 8y ago
Great question.
In theory, jobs put an upper limit on housing usage. People almost always follow jobs.
There are many beautiful cities in the world but only SF is near Silicon Valley.
You can find cheap housing in nice areas if they don’t depend on jobs (college towns, retirement communities).
People will present counter examples at the margins of course, but generally the relationship holds.
- gascan 8y agoBut, also in theory, cost of living drives competitive salary, which in turn drives whether a company can afford to hire employees in a particular city. So if you build more housing, cost of living goes down, which attracts more companies to the city who were priced out of the labor pool before, which increases jobs in the city, which attracts people and increases housing usage...
- inputcoffee 8y agoThe part of this logical chain that I don’t follow is the low cost of living attracting companies. I can see why low cost of living ought to attract companies but in practice the new companies seem to gravitate towards already high cost of living cities. This may be because the other considerations (workers, education, infrastructure etc) May outweigh low cost of living alone. Or there might be another reason I cannot think of.