9 ms·

The article also notes that Oulu has inexpensive housing. Inexpensive housing is a lesson many cities could use—from Berlin to London to San Francisco. Having a

The article also notes that Oulu has inexpensive housing. Inexpensive housing is a lesson many cities could use—from Berlin to London to San Francisco. Having affordable housing help everyone from people with high-paying tech jobs to have the time to find new work, to people with lower incomes.

kmlx 7y ago
1. if you want inexpensive housing then you need to find enough voters that would take a X% haircut on their investment in their own home. good luck with that. 2. i don't think you realise just how small oulu actually is. mega-cities like tokyo, sydney, london or nyc are hugely complex machines.
- MagnumOpus 7y ago
  > then you need to find enough voters that would take a X% haircut on their investment in their own home Or build entire new cities. This is what the UK did after WW2 [0], building dozens of new cities of 100k to 250k people, most notably Milton Keynes, Peterborough and Northampton. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_towns_in_the_United_Kingdom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_towns_in_the_United_Kingdo...
  - kmlx 7y ago
    for the UK in particular that would not bring the housing costs down. you can build as many houses as you want, the prices in the UK will still be high.
    - Jonnax 7y ago
      Supply and demand doesn't work in the UK?
      - rumanator 7y ago
        Not all demand comes from potential home owners. Real estate has been a magnet for institutional investors for years, particularly in Europe after ECB's quantitative easing policy.
- RugnirViking 7y ago
  One wonders how many voters in cities own any property, even their own house. I'm going to go out on a limb and say it's at least less than half. Possibly much less, but I'd like to see data if its out there. Obviously the sort that own property are more likely to vote, but there are many many more people who rent.
  - chrischen 7y ago
    In America it is free speech, as in propaganda. So it matters less the individual voter and more the ads.
  - fauigerzigerk 7y ago
    The homeownership rate in the US as well as in the UK is 65%. What it means is that 65% of homes are occupied by their owners. It doesn't mean that 65% of people live in their own homes, but I suspect it is not too far off the share of people living in their own home or in a home owned by a family member or partner. I guess the difference is people renting a room in a house occupied by its owner. Did I forget anyone? It may not be the same at all in big cities though. I know that homeownership rates in London have collapsed far below 50% in recent years. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RHORUSQ156N https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RHORUSQ156N https://tradingeconomics.com/united-kingdom/home-ownership-rate https://tradingeconomics.com/united-kingdom/home-ownership-r... https://www.ethnicity-facts-figures.service.gov.uk/housing/owning-and-renting/home-ownership/latest https://www.ethnicity-facts-figures.service.gov.uk/housing/o...
    - RugnirViking 7y ago
      Yeah the cities thing was what I was thinking about mostly - in the countryside home ownership is higher as prices are less, less apartments and there are less big property owners. Theres also the question of what it means to own ones house. A lot of people have a mortgage for their house, but the relationship between this and benefitting from the value appreciating is different for different people.
  - ljcn 7y ago
    > at least less than half "Households in London were fairly evenly distributed across the tenures, with half in owner occupation and half in the rented sectors." Section 1.10 in https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/english-housing-survey-2015-to-2016-headline-report https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/english-housing-sur... To get the number of voters you could weight by average occupancies but I don't know what those numbers are.
- i_am_proteus 7y ago
  Or just pass laws enshrining property owners' rights to build at a higher level of government-- Oregon has recently done this.
- frobozz 7y ago
  > find enough voters that would take a X% haircut Or enact laws that don't have a negative effect on most voters - e.g. block non-resident ownership like in NZ and give owner-occupiers the same tax breaks as landlords. I would gladly see the value of my house drop by 60%, if it meant that all the bigger/nicer houses in the area also dropped by 60%. For most homeowners, the absolute value of their house is broadly irrelevant. What matters most is the difference between their current house and the next one they want to move to. People looking to stay put for the foreseeable future are unaffected by changes in house prices. Empty nest downshifters benefit from prices remaining high and rising, as do flippers, landlords, and those with a very high LTV who wish to move. People looking to move to a bigger/better house would benefit (e.g. renters saving up to buy, a young family currently outgrowing the house that was perfect when the parents were just a couple).
  - CodeCube 7y ago
    > What matters most is the difference between their current house and the next one they want to move to. Thank you!! Exactly this
    - NovemberWhiskey 7y ago
      I feel that's a bit naive: many people do not own their homes outright and are leveraged as a result of their mortgage loans. Say I own 50% of the equity in a home valued at $1M today, and I want to move into a new home valued at $1.5M. I sell my current home, and I realize enough cash ($0.5M) to cover a 33% down-payment on the new home. Assuming I have the cash flow to satisfy the lender I can pay the mortgage, I can make the move. But assume all property decreases in value by half. Now when I come to sell my home I only get back enough to repay the mortgage and I have nothing to fund a down-payment on the new home. Even though the difference in price between the homes halved, I can no longer afford the move.
      - CodeCube 7y ago
        That's a good point ... the original argument only holds water when the mortgage isn't underwater ;)
- davidw 7y ago
  > investment in their own home Housing cannot be both 1) "a good investment" in that it grows more than the economy 2) and affordable. Ideally, prices would be fairly stable, so that people can swap out of different housing depending on their needs at different stages of life without stressing too much about 'the market'.
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  Not just the homeowners, the banks / current mortgage holders. Real estate is a backstop on equity. Leveraged real estate is (as with homeowners) a tremendous risk to financing firms. They will (and have) fought tooth and nail to resist any depreciation of assets. This is one of the resistances to technological innovations that Bernhard J. Stern wrote of in 1937. The commonality with the other examples he gives is striking. https://archive.org/details/technologicaltre1937unitrich/page/39 https://archive.org/details/technologicaltre1937unitrich/pag... Retyped Markdown: https://pastebin.com/raw/Bapu75is https://pastebin.com/raw/Bapu75is
- jotm 7y ago
  ~200K residents... Same as most cities in Romania. Come to Romania, lol, there's gigabit fiber and good food everywhere, great all-round weather. Buy a house 5-10km from the city for ~60K.
mytailorisrich 7y ago
This is not something that can be decided by edict. Prices are driven by supply and demand. Highly desirable locations with limited scope to increase supply have always been expensive, and will always be expensive. Oulu is a small place almost literally in the middle of nowhere and extremely North, hardly a property hotspot.
- freeone3000 7y ago
  Okay but what if we just let people build condos until people stopped buying them?
  - tasuki 7y ago
    > Okay but what if we just let people build condos until people stopped buying them? I guess the question is "let people build condos" ... where? What if there's a natural park? Or what if something is private property and the owner doesn't want you to build there?
    - zamfi 7y ago
      Umm...many cities (SF, NYC, most of California, ...) have plenty of prohibitions on building condos that go far beyond “there’s a natural park there” and “the owner doesn’t want random people building condos on his property”. Zoning laws basically prevent construction of condos even by the owners of the property in like 90% of the Bay Area, if not more...
- cyborgx7 7y ago
  >Prices are driven by supply and demand. Highly desirable locations with limited scope to increase supply will always be expensive. You know it's possible to regulate prices with laws, do you? The thing you said is not a law of nature, just something we agreed on. And we can change our mind.
  - mytailorisrich 7y ago
    Supply and demand is as close as a 'law of nature' as can be. It is natural human behaviour. Price controls do not work and are actually damaging because instead of trying to balance supply and demand they make the imbalance even worse. They do not remove the pressure of supply and demand, which continues to be at play.
8ytecoder 7y ago
I'm visiting a smallish town in the UK and working remote from here. It's perfect. I can get a 50% paycut and still be able to live a happy life here. I see lots of companies starting to accept remote and my company strongly supports it as well. I don't usually like working from home/remote but I'm thoroughly enjoying these past weeks. I support building up (with ample green space) to bring down the cost. But that doesn't have to be the only solution. The attitude that everyone has to work from an office every day of every week is ridiculous to me. A week or two per quarter of travel and then a strong culture around remote work will distribute the prosperity as well. The future economy is knowledge based and we better prepare for it.
Apocryphon 7y ago
Isn't Berlin housing relatively plentiful and inexpensive, compared to many other tech hubs?
- mediaman 7y ago
  Yes. Rents are up quite a bit, but when I was there this year, one bedroom apartments could be had for 600-800 Euros.
- adulakis 7y ago
  For a senior software engineer it is way easier to find a job paying double the german average salary (around 3500€/month) than rent an apartment in an ok/good location that is not hugely overpriced. Ppl in low earning jobs are commonly spending 70 - 80% of their net salary to the rent.
kofejnik 7y ago
> Oulu has inexpensive housing you know why Oulu has inexpensive housing? Because not many people want to live there. I probably wouldn't live there even if they paid me to live there. You want to make SF affordable? No problem, make it bad enough so that no one will want to live there
dnate 7y ago
> Berlin to London to San Francisco one of those is not like the other. Berlin has recently passed a law capping rent at below 9 Euro per square meter (much less in many regions) all over the city. It's the first time such a law was passed anywhere in Germany. [1] [1] https://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/soziales/eckpunkte-fuer-mietpreisdeckel-berlin-wird-zum-labor-fuer-mieterschutz-a-1273080.html https://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/soziales/eckpunkte-fuer-mi...
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  Rent control is often seen as counterproductive -- a disincentive to creating more housing. What if it's the reverse? The supply of land is fixed. Its intensity of usage is not. By imposing a per unit rent cap, what's effectively happening is that a rule is being established that no more rent than that cap can be extracted per unit. But there's no inherent restriction (zoning, construction laws, etc., being of course the exceptions) to more intensive development. Increasing the unit count. A rent cap plus zoning restrictions is one form of death: there's no new housing supplied, and if the issue is rent control (limited rates of increase over tenancy), then the result is similar to what happens in San Francisco. But with sane zoning and construction standards and a cap, you're inducing more intensive development -- an increase in housing supply -- by imposing an arbitrary per-unit revenue cap. And without nominally raising taxes, the bugbear of the land value tax approach. I'm not aware this argument has ever been proposed, though I am fairly confident it has been.
  - rumanator 7y ago
    > But with sane zoning and construction standards and a cap, you're inducing more intensive development Your hypothesis assumes that increasing the potential revenue by square meter has no effect attracting Urban development projects. It seems obvious that if it's possible to increase intensity then being able to generate more income per m² only helps put together a valid business plan that increases supply.
    - dredmorbius 7y ago
      The problem is that all else isn't held equal. There are two ways to increase revenue per m^2. One is to intensify the construction. The other is to limit supply. For numerous reasons, the latter approach ... seems to predominate. Rather than constructing denser residential, commercial, and (where appropriate) industrial space, the tendency is both to sprawl out, and to simply refuse to allow new construction. San Francisco is the pathalogical case, but hardly the only, and numerous other US growth areas (LA, Seattle, Austin) and elsewhere (Sydney, Vancouver, London) are to large degrees similar. There's new construction ... of large McMansions. But not of denser forms of housing. By imposing an arbitrary constraint in one dimension (rent extraction per unit) but allowing intensification on another (density or height of construction), this should be addressable. Keep in mind that most of SF is at best 2 storey construction. You don't have to airdrop Salesforce Towers all over the city, only allow construction to 4-5 storeys, to more than double effective density. Apply this more broadly over the SF Bay Area, and what's become a region-threatening blockage to housing availability (and incidental issues such as traffic congestion, hours-long commutes, access to schools and services, etc., etc.) would be lifted. The fact that landlords (or banks, through mortgages) can extract arbitrarily high amounts of rent from a given area regardless of intensity of development, is the problem. The land value tax is one approach, and is probably a better one. I'm considering what the implications of a rents cap might be. A usual objection to rent controls (increases on existing units) is that landlords are not incentivised to maintain or improve the quality of units. Whether that might also apply to a cap is a possible objection.
anttisalmela 7y ago
City uses combination of zoning laws, right of pre-emption and expropriation to have good and affordable housing supply. Policy is that land is not zoned until it's acquired by the city, which will then sell and lease lots - old landowners can't get huge windfalls from city growth and lease contracts force to build in allotted time.
TheMinorityGuy 7y ago
Affordable housing => When people who live in the city are able to afford it. In that sense SF or Mountain View are fairly affordable to most people who live there. It is unaffordable to students or starbucks barista but that is a different problem altogether. Regions offer different opportunities and quality of living and cost of living are highly correlated. I am happy to move from Mumbai to Mountain View despite it being expensive. But why would I move to Oulu or Oslo ? No mater how cool you think Oulu will not come even close to Sunnyvale or Mountain View in terms of value it will generate while maintaining those "cheap housing". There are trade offs and different cities have settled for different things. You can't have both except in case of Bay area where so much land is under conservation. Building more housign there would literally solve the housing crisis overnight.

kmlx 7y ago

1. if you want inexpensive housing then you need to find enough voters that would take a X% haircut on their investment in their own home. good luck with that. 2. i don't think you realise just how small oulu actually is. mega-cities like tokyo, sydney, london or nyc are hugely complex machines.

MagnumOpus 7y ago
> then you need to find enough voters that would take a X% haircut on their investment in their own home Or build entire new cities. This is what the UK did after WW2 [0], building dozens of new cities of 100k to 250k people, most notably Milton Keynes, Peterborough and Northampton. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_towns_in_the_United_Kingdom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_towns_in_the_United_Kingdo...
- kmlx 7y ago
  for the UK in particular that would not bring the housing costs down. you can build as many houses as you want, the prices in the UK will still be high.
  - Jonnax 7y ago
    Supply and demand doesn't work in the UK?
    - rumanator 7y ago
      Not all demand comes from potential home owners. Real estate has been a magnet for institutional investors for years, particularly in Europe after ECB's quantitative easing policy.
RugnirViking 7y ago
One wonders how many voters in cities own any property, even their own house. I'm going to go out on a limb and say it's at least less than half. Possibly much less, but I'd like to see data if its out there. Obviously the sort that own property are more likely to vote, but there are many many more people who rent.
- chrischen 7y ago
  In America it is free speech, as in propaganda. So it matters less the individual voter and more the ads.
- fauigerzigerk 7y ago
  The homeownership rate in the US as well as in the UK is 65%. What it means is that 65% of homes are occupied by their owners. It doesn't mean that 65% of people live in their own homes, but I suspect it is not too far off the share of people living in their own home or in a home owned by a family member or partner. I guess the difference is people renting a room in a house occupied by its owner. Did I forget anyone? It may not be the same at all in big cities though. I know that homeownership rates in London have collapsed far below 50% in recent years. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RHORUSQ156N https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RHORUSQ156N https://tradingeconomics.com/united-kingdom/home-ownership-rate https://tradingeconomics.com/united-kingdom/home-ownership-r... https://www.ethnicity-facts-figures.service.gov.uk/housing/owning-and-renting/home-ownership/latest https://www.ethnicity-facts-figures.service.gov.uk/housing/o...
  - RugnirViking 7y ago
    Yeah the cities thing was what I was thinking about mostly - in the countryside home ownership is higher as prices are less, less apartments and there are less big property owners. Theres also the question of what it means to own ones house. A lot of people have a mortgage for their house, but the relationship between this and benefitting from the value appreciating is different for different people.
- ljcn 7y ago
  > at least less than half "Households in London were fairly evenly distributed across the tenures, with half in owner occupation and half in the rented sectors." Section 1.10 in https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/english-housing-survey-2015-to-2016-headline-report https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/english-housing-sur... To get the number of voters you could weight by average occupancies but I don't know what those numbers are.
i_am_proteus 7y ago
Or just pass laws enshrining property owners' rights to build at a higher level of government-- Oregon has recently done this.
frobozz 7y ago
> find enough voters that would take a X% haircut Or enact laws that don't have a negative effect on most voters - e.g. block non-resident ownership like in NZ and give owner-occupiers the same tax breaks as landlords. I would gladly see the value of my house drop by 60%, if it meant that all the bigger/nicer houses in the area also dropped by 60%. For most homeowners, the absolute value of their house is broadly irrelevant. What matters most is the difference between their current house and the next one they want to move to. People looking to stay put for the foreseeable future are unaffected by changes in house prices. Empty nest downshifters benefit from prices remaining high and rising, as do flippers, landlords, and those with a very high LTV who wish to move. People looking to move to a bigger/better house would benefit (e.g. renters saving up to buy, a young family currently outgrowing the house that was perfect when the parents were just a couple).
- CodeCube 7y ago
  > What matters most is the difference between their current house and the next one they want to move to. Thank you!! Exactly this
  - NovemberWhiskey 7y ago
    I feel that's a bit naive: many people do not own their homes outright and are leveraged as a result of their mortgage loans. Say I own 50% of the equity in a home valued at $1M today, and I want to move into a new home valued at $1.5M. I sell my current home, and I realize enough cash ($0.5M) to cover a 33% down-payment on the new home. Assuming I have the cash flow to satisfy the lender I can pay the mortgage, I can make the move. But assume all property decreases in value by half. Now when I come to sell my home I only get back enough to repay the mortgage and I have nothing to fund a down-payment on the new home. Even though the difference in price between the homes halved, I can no longer afford the move.
    - CodeCube 7y ago
      That's a good point ... the original argument only holds water when the mortgage isn't underwater ;)
davidw 7y ago
> investment in their own home Housing cannot be both 1) "a good investment" in that it grows more than the economy 2) and affordable. Ideally, prices would be fairly stable, so that people can swap out of different housing depending on their needs at different stages of life without stressing too much about 'the market'.
dredmorbius 7y ago
Not just the homeowners, the banks / current mortgage holders. Real estate is a backstop on equity. Leveraged real estate is (as with homeowners) a tremendous risk to financing firms. They will (and have) fought tooth and nail to resist any depreciation of assets. This is one of the resistances to technological innovations that Bernhard J. Stern wrote of in 1937. The commonality with the other examples he gives is striking. https://archive.org/details/technologicaltre1937unitrich/page/39 https://archive.org/details/technologicaltre1937unitrich/pag... Retyped Markdown: https://pastebin.com/raw/Bapu75is https://pastebin.com/raw/Bapu75is
jotm 7y ago
~200K residents... Same as most cities in Romania. Come to Romania, lol, there's gigabit fiber and good food everywhere, great all-round weather. Buy a house 5-10km from the city for ~60K.

mytailorisrich 7y ago

This is not something that can be decided by edict. Prices are driven by supply and demand. Highly desirable locations with limited scope to increase supply have always been expensive, and will always be expensive. Oulu is a small place almost literally in the middle of nowhere and extremely North, hardly a property hotspot.

freeone3000 7y ago
Okay but what if we just let people build condos until people stopped buying them?
- tasuki 7y ago
  > Okay but what if we just let people build condos until people stopped buying them? I guess the question is "let people build condos" ... where? What if there's a natural park? Or what if something is private property and the owner doesn't want you to build there?
  - zamfi 7y ago
    Umm...many cities (SF, NYC, most of California, ...) have plenty of prohibitions on building condos that go far beyond “there’s a natural park there” and “the owner doesn’t want random people building condos on his property”. Zoning laws basically prevent construction of condos even by the owners of the property in like 90% of the Bay Area, if not more...
cyborgx7 7y ago
>Prices are driven by supply and demand. Highly desirable locations with limited scope to increase supply will always be expensive. You know it's possible to regulate prices with laws, do you? The thing you said is not a law of nature, just something we agreed on. And we can change our mind.
- mytailorisrich 7y ago
  Supply and demand is as close as a 'law of nature' as can be. It is natural human behaviour. Price controls do not work and are actually damaging because instead of trying to balance supply and demand they make the imbalance even worse. They do not remove the pressure of supply and demand, which continues to be at play.

8ytecoder 7y ago

I'm visiting a smallish town in the UK and working remote from here. It's perfect. I can get a 50% paycut and still be able to live a happy life here. I see lots of companies starting to accept remote and my company strongly supports it as well. I don't usually like working from home/remote but I'm thoroughly enjoying these past weeks. I support building up (with ample green space) to bring down the cost. But that doesn't have to be the only solution. The attitude that everyone has to work from an office every day of every week is ridiculous to me. A week or two per quarter of travel and then a strong culture around remote work will distribute the prosperity as well. The future economy is knowledge based and we better prepare for it.

Apocryphon 7y ago

Isn't Berlin housing relatively plentiful and inexpensive, compared to many other tech hubs?

mediaman 7y ago
Yes. Rents are up quite a bit, but when I was there this year, one bedroom apartments could be had for 600-800 Euros.
adulakis 7y ago
For a senior software engineer it is way easier to find a job paying double the german average salary (around 3500€/month) than rent an apartment in an ok/good location that is not hugely overpriced. Ppl in low earning jobs are commonly spending 70 - 80% of their net salary to the rent.

kofejnik 7y ago

> Oulu has inexpensive housing you know why Oulu has inexpensive housing? Because not many people want to live there. I probably wouldn't live there even if they paid me to live there. You want to make SF affordable? No problem, make it bad enough so that no one will want to live there

dnate 7y ago

> Berlin to London to San Francisco one of those is not like the other. Berlin has recently passed a law capping rent at below 9 Euro per square meter (much less in many regions) all over the city. It's the first time such a law was passed anywhere in Germany. [1] [1] https://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/soziales/eckpunkte-fuer-mietpreisdeckel-berlin-wird-zum-labor-fuer-mieterschutz-a-1273080.html https://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/soziales/eckpunkte-fuer-mi...

dredmorbius 7y ago
Rent control is often seen as counterproductive -- a disincentive to creating more housing. What if it's the reverse? The supply of land is fixed. Its intensity of usage is not. By imposing a per unit rent cap, what's effectively happening is that a rule is being established that no more rent than that cap can be extracted per unit. But there's no inherent restriction (zoning, construction laws, etc., being of course the exceptions) to more intensive development. Increasing the unit count. A rent cap plus zoning restrictions is one form of death: there's no new housing supplied, and if the issue is rent control (limited rates of increase over tenancy), then the result is similar to what happens in San Francisco. But with sane zoning and construction standards and a cap, you're inducing more intensive development -- an increase in housing supply -- by imposing an arbitrary per-unit revenue cap. And without nominally raising taxes, the bugbear of the land value tax approach. I'm not aware this argument has ever been proposed, though I am fairly confident it has been.
- rumanator 7y ago
  > But with sane zoning and construction standards and a cap, you're inducing more intensive development Your hypothesis assumes that increasing the potential revenue by square meter has no effect attracting Urban development projects. It seems obvious that if it's possible to increase intensity then being able to generate more income per m² only helps put together a valid business plan that increases supply.
  - dredmorbius 7y ago
    The problem is that all else isn't held equal. There are two ways to increase revenue per m^2. One is to intensify the construction. The other is to limit supply. For numerous reasons, the latter approach ... seems to predominate. Rather than constructing denser residential, commercial, and (where appropriate) industrial space, the tendency is both to sprawl out, and to simply refuse to allow new construction. San Francisco is the pathalogical case, but hardly the only, and numerous other US growth areas (LA, Seattle, Austin) and elsewhere (Sydney, Vancouver, London) are to large degrees similar. There's new construction ... of large McMansions. But not of denser forms of housing. By imposing an arbitrary constraint in one dimension (rent extraction per unit) but allowing intensification on another (density or height of construction), this should be addressable. Keep in mind that most of SF is at best 2 storey construction. You don't have to airdrop Salesforce Towers all over the city, only allow construction to 4-5 storeys, to more than double effective density. Apply this more broadly over the SF Bay Area, and what's become a region-threatening blockage to housing availability (and incidental issues such as traffic congestion, hours-long commutes, access to schools and services, etc., etc.) would be lifted. The fact that landlords (or banks, through mortgages) can extract arbitrarily high amounts of rent from a given area regardless of intensity of development, is the problem. The land value tax is one approach, and is probably a better one. I'm considering what the implications of a rents cap might be. A usual objection to rent controls (increases on existing units) is that landlords are not incentivised to maintain or improve the quality of units. Whether that might also apply to a cap is a possible objection.

anttisalmela 7y ago

City uses combination of zoning laws, right of pre-emption and expropriation to have good and affordable housing supply. Policy is that land is not zoned until it's acquired by the city, which will then sell and lease lots - old landowners can't get huge windfalls from city growth and lease contracts force to build in allotted time.

TheMinorityGuy 7y ago

Affordable housing => When people who live in the city are able to afford it. In that sense SF or Mountain View are fairly affordable to most people who live there. It is unaffordable to students or starbucks barista but that is a different problem altogether. Regions offer different opportunities and quality of living and cost of living are highly correlated. I am happy to move from Mumbai to Mountain View despite it being expensive. But why would I move to Oulu or Oslo ? No mater how cool you think Oulu will not come even close to Sunnyvale or Mountain View in terms of value it will generate while maintaining those "cheap housing". There are trade offs and different cities have settled for different things. You can't have both except in case of Bay area where so much land is under conservation. Building more housign there would literally solve the housing crisis overnight.