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Build more housing only works if you actually build enough to satisfy the demand — so it would be cool if we knew a number of houses built vs people trying to b
by xt00 8y ago
Build more housing only works if you actually build enough to satisfy the demand — so it would be cool if we knew a number of houses built vs people trying to buy houses type of thing. Maybe you are right just I don’t know the data on the subject for Vancouver. I heard similar arguments while living in Bay Area that “we’ve tried to build our way out of this problem and it hasn’t worked for 20 years” but actually they were building one house for every 10 people moving there so, in that case it was a case that they under built for a long time because after people would move to their little corner of SF they would say ok no more people.. it’s good as is..
ultimately if you look at places like Dayton (good frontline episode on this recently), you see what happens when you build a ton of housing during a boom then factories leave and the houses then sell for basically $0.. often people are buying houses there for $5k, and buying 5 at a time then remodeling them. So overbuilding is bad as well as underbuilding.. my take is that the most sustainable building approach is to build in places that people still want to live in even when the economy is down. Like surprise surprise living 40 miles outside of Las Vegas next to a strip mall likely will drop in value when you can afford to buy a place that is more desirable closer to services and jobs and friends.
- 40acres 8y agoWe need to be smart about where we want to invest housing in. People are living in cities now and Columbus has been bigger than Dayton for quite some time. Columbus will hit 1M people soon. Columbus has a diverse set of industry and is more of a service industry city, Dayton was always a one industry town.