If you build dense enough in an area with a hot job market you’ll still get large differences in house/apartment prices but you won’t get houses costing 100x pl

If you build dense enough in an area with a hot job market you’ll still get large differences in house/apartment prices but you won’t get houses costing 100x plus what they do elsewhere. Pal Alto 1950s ranch homes cost a lot more than the equivalent in Boise. If you want to see what building dense can do don’t look at Seattle. Look at New York City. Brooklyn isn’t Manhattan dense but it’s more affordable. But NYC’s entire metro area is comparatively dense in the US. People commute from Jersey City in under an hour. If all of NYC was zoned to allow the level of density you see in Manhattan prices wouldn’t drop as much as you’d naively expect because there’d be even more economic activity but they’d drop plenty. Tokyo has increased ~50% in population over the past thirty years and land and rent prices have been pretty much flat. That’s what allowing dense building makes possible.