7 ms·

> it is insane that cities are more expensive when city dwellers consume less resources and incur fewer environmental externalities, and are more productive If

> it is insane that cities are more expensive when city dwellers consume less resources and incur fewer environmental externalities, and are more productive If people in the city earn more on average than people elsewhere, then everything will cost more, just supply and demand. Not sure what you can do about that besides put price controls on literally everything. That and the extra taxes and other business costs. When the hot dog vendor has to pay a million dollars a year for their spot at central park then they're going to have to charge more.

saddlerustle 5y ago
It's not "just supply and demand". Supply can increase to match demand! The production of almost everything in our lives has economies of scale, so it's surprising that this isn't the case for cost of living in cities. It also use to be true! The main thing that changed is government policies increasingly restricting supply.
- nobodyandproud 5y ago
  Real estate isn’t instantly scalable. It takes years of planning and decades of execution to create a truly scalable city. With stores, they’re squeezed on both ends: Pressure from online retailers and then exorbitant rents. It’s not unusual to have monthly rents that go into mid-five figures for a small store at ground level. Few small businesses can sustain that in the long term.
- kube-system 5y ago
  The amount of land in a given area of a city in largely fixed. You can build upwards to create more usable space, but there are no economies of scale in doing this. The relationship is the opposite —- taller buildings are more expensive per unit of area as you go up. Space is a multi-floor building is not constructed marginally like a widget in a factory. Each floor must support the floor above it.
  - bobthepanda 5y ago
    While this is true, the expectations of the US have also overshot. The US is an outlier in terms of square footage in new homes, American homes are very large. And personally I don't want some 2000 sq ft McMansion because that means all the cooling, heating, cleaning, and maintenance of such a large space that I've only ever seen really used to accumulate lots of stuff. We don't need to go to extremes (a Parisian studio can go as low as 100 square feet!) but house size in the US has mostly crept up as a function of minimum lot sizes in US zoning.
    - kube-system 5y ago
      Those homes aren’t in cities where space is a concern. They’re in sprawling suburbs where land is highly available. The construction costs of those 2000 square foot homes is cheaper than 1000 square foot on the 25th floor of a building. People in the US have a choice between the two, and they’re largely chosen to put up with a commute from the suburbs in exchange for more space. Those lot sizes aren’t just wasted space. Lower density also translates to more green space, lower noise, fewer shared spaces, etc.
      - Ericson2314 5y ago
        People are choosing suburbs based on costs. The aver person has little ability to choose based on any other reason. This is why it's incredibly important that we fix this stuff. Rich environmentalists' "sacrifices" achieve nothing. It is also why I am incredibly sad the current infrastructure bill is slated to fund so much stupid suburbanization.
        kube-system 5y ago
        They’re choosing suburbs for value, not cost. There are plenty of apartments available in cities at rents lower than the average suburban mortgage payment. If we want revitalized cities where people want to live, we don’t just need low cost housing, we need high value housing. The middle class didn’t leave cities on cost alone and they’re not going to move back to cities on cost alone.
- perl4ever 5y ago
  I think you're (and Ericson2314) confusing/conflating two different ideas. Big cities obviously have economies of scale, so, say, the chicken lo mein is fresher and hotter due to higher volume. Or, the first time I had a cup of plain coffee at a random cafe in NYC, it was stunningly good. Any reasonably successful business has much higher volume than in a less populated area and is pressured by competition more too. They can and must do better. But people make more money on average in a big city, and that means they spend more. If the exact grade of hamburger available everywhere is 20% cheaper, that doesn't in any way prevent your meals from being much more expensive. The whole point of being in a city is so you can get stuff you can't otherwise. If you are living and working in NYC, are you going to just have the same fast food you could get in Albany, that's incrementally better? Don't mix up "city dwellers use less resources for a unit of a given thing" with "city dwellers use less resources period".
  - Ericson2314 5y ago
    For green house gas emissions, at least, it is absolute. See https://coolclimate.org/maps https://coolclimate.org/maps. True rural and true urban (with public transit predominating) is good. But the suburbs where most people live are absolute trash.
    - perl4ever 5y ago
      >the suburbs where most people live I'm inclined to think that carbon emissions (or consumption in general) are primarily a product of wealth. It would be possible in principle to normalize that map for household income, and I wonder if it would show the same pattern.
BurningFrog 5y ago
The dominant factor making US cities expensive to live in is that they ban housing construction. Legalizing a healthy housing supply would improve this country more than anything I can think of.
- beerandt 5y ago
  Then we should repeal the majority of Dodd-Frank.
  - BurningFrog 5y ago
    Repealing zoning is the more common answer :) What in Dodd-Frank stops housing construction?
    - beerandt 5y ago
      It makes financing single family homes near impossible for speculative builders. Builders need to find a buyer to do the financing before construction can start. Actually it makes private financing difficult for all builders, but then it created easier programs through hud to finance section 8 multi family apartments. Which is why you see crappy apartments being built at a faster rate than cookie cutter homes were being built in 2007. Zoning is part of it as well, but zoning on its own does nothing if people can't get financing to build. And a large majority of the population will only buy what's already built, and won't finance new construction on their own.
      - BurningFrog 5y ago
        Thanks. Hadn't heard about that before.
      - Ericson2314 5y ago
        > Which is why you see crappy apartments being built at a faster rate than cookie cutter homes were being built in 2007. I wish this were true!
  - 5y ago
Ericson2314 5y ago
> Why this reminds me of treating workers as caged hen? Dense in the sense of building complexes of decent size family homes? That I could support, but building blocks of shoebox flats, should really be eliminated. Affordability is the ratio of income to prices. Nobody is saying city prices should never be higher in absolute terms, they simply shouldn't keep up with the higher incomes.

saddlerustle 5y ago

It's not "just supply and demand". Supply can increase to match demand! The production of almost everything in our lives has economies of scale, so it's surprising that this isn't the case for cost of living in cities. It also use to be true! The main thing that changed is government policies increasingly restricting supply.

nobodyandproud 5y ago
Real estate isn’t instantly scalable. It takes years of planning and decades of execution to create a truly scalable city. With stores, they’re squeezed on both ends: Pressure from online retailers and then exorbitant rents. It’s not unusual to have monthly rents that go into mid-five figures for a small store at ground level. Few small businesses can sustain that in the long term.
kube-system 5y ago
The amount of land in a given area of a city in largely fixed. You can build upwards to create more usable space, but there are no economies of scale in doing this. The relationship is the opposite —- taller buildings are more expensive per unit of area as you go up. Space is a multi-floor building is not constructed marginally like a widget in a factory. Each floor must support the floor above it.
- bobthepanda 5y ago
  While this is true, the expectations of the US have also overshot. The US is an outlier in terms of square footage in new homes, American homes are very large. And personally I don't want some 2000 sq ft McMansion because that means all the cooling, heating, cleaning, and maintenance of such a large space that I've only ever seen really used to accumulate lots of stuff. We don't need to go to extremes (a Parisian studio can go as low as 100 square feet!) but house size in the US has mostly crept up as a function of minimum lot sizes in US zoning.
  - kube-system 5y ago
    Those homes aren’t in cities where space is a concern. They’re in sprawling suburbs where land is highly available. The construction costs of those 2000 square foot homes is cheaper than 1000 square foot on the 25th floor of a building. People in the US have a choice between the two, and they’re largely chosen to put up with a commute from the suburbs in exchange for more space. Those lot sizes aren’t just wasted space. Lower density also translates to more green space, lower noise, fewer shared spaces, etc.
    - Ericson2314 5y ago
      People are choosing suburbs based on costs. The aver person has little ability to choose based on any other reason. This is why it's incredibly important that we fix this stuff. Rich environmentalists' "sacrifices" achieve nothing. It is also why I am incredibly sad the current infrastructure bill is slated to fund so much stupid suburbanization.
      - kube-system 5y ago
        They’re choosing suburbs for value, not cost. There are plenty of apartments available in cities at rents lower than the average suburban mortgage payment. If we want revitalized cities where people want to live, we don’t just need low cost housing, we need high value housing. The middle class didn’t leave cities on cost alone and they’re not going to move back to cities on cost alone.
perl4ever 5y ago
I think you're (and Ericson2314) confusing/conflating two different ideas. Big cities obviously have economies of scale, so, say, the chicken lo mein is fresher and hotter due to higher volume. Or, the first time I had a cup of plain coffee at a random cafe in NYC, it was stunningly good. Any reasonably successful business has much higher volume than in a less populated area and is pressured by competition more too. They can and must do better. But people make more money on average in a big city, and that means they spend more. If the exact grade of hamburger available everywhere is 20% cheaper, that doesn't in any way prevent your meals from being much more expensive. The whole point of being in a city is so you can get stuff you can't otherwise. If you are living and working in NYC, are you going to just have the same fast food you could get in Albany, that's incrementally better? Don't mix up "city dwellers use less resources for a unit of a given thing" with "city dwellers use less resources period".
- Ericson2314 5y ago
  For green house gas emissions, at least, it is absolute. See https://coolclimate.org/maps https://coolclimate.org/maps. True rural and true urban (with public transit predominating) is good. But the suburbs where most people live are absolute trash.
  - perl4ever 5y ago
    >the suburbs where most people live I'm inclined to think that carbon emissions (or consumption in general) are primarily a product of wealth. It would be possible in principle to normalize that map for household income, and I wonder if it would show the same pattern.

BurningFrog 5y ago

The dominant factor making US cities expensive to live in is that they ban housing construction. Legalizing a healthy housing supply would improve this country more than anything I can think of.

beerandt 5y ago
Then we should repeal the majority of Dodd-Frank.
- BurningFrog 5y ago
  Repealing zoning is the more common answer :) What in Dodd-Frank stops housing construction?
  - beerandt 5y ago
    It makes financing single family homes near impossible for speculative builders. Builders need to find a buyer to do the financing before construction can start. Actually it makes private financing difficult for all builders, but then it created easier programs through hud to finance section 8 multi family apartments. Which is why you see crappy apartments being built at a faster rate than cookie cutter homes were being built in 2007. Zoning is part of it as well, but zoning on its own does nothing if people can't get financing to build. And a large majority of the population will only buy what's already built, and won't finance new construction on their own.
    - BurningFrog 5y ago
      Thanks. Hadn't heard about that before.
    - Ericson2314 5y ago
      > Which is why you see crappy apartments being built at a faster rate than cookie cutter homes were being built in 2007. I wish this were true!
- 5y ago

Ericson2314 5y ago

> Why this reminds me of treating workers as caged hen? Dense in the sense of building complexes of decent size family homes? That I could support, but building blocks of shoebox flats, should really be eliminated. Affordability is the ratio of income to prices. Nobody is saying city prices should never be higher in absolute terms, they simply shouldn't keep up with the higher incomes.