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> My only point was that making cities more dense seems to make them more desirable, causing more people to want to live there. Increasing housing in this mann

> My only point was that making cities more dense seems to make them more desirable, causing more people to want to live there. Increasing housing in this manner would probably boost land prices, but over a greater number of units, so result in overall decrease in housing cost. NYC is a bit of a weird spot in real estate, in that having a Manhattan address (and probably a Williamsburg or Bushwick address to a lesser degree these days) is a status symbol for foreigners, in the same way that London or Paris might be. Most American cities do not have this kind of cachet and so at some point prices will fall if you build enough. The problem is really that housing production would have to increase by an incredible amount to get to affordable. To use the example of Tokyo as affordable, let's look at comparative housing production statistics. * The 23 special wards of Tokyo, 8.9M people, built 110,000 new homes that year. * The entire country of England, population 53M, built 115,000 homes a year. * The metropolitan area of NY, population 20.3M, approved 27,000 units in 2012, but approvals != actual construction. https://nextcity.org/urbanist-news/entry/tokyo-housing-high-rise-cost-new-york-housing https://nextcity.org/urbanist-news/entry/tokyo-housing-high-...

seanmcdirmid 5y ago
> * The 23 special wards of Tokyo, 8.9M people, built 110,000 new homes that year. Since housing is refreshed in Japan on a 20-30 year basis, you can't quote the number of housing built without comparing it to the number of housing torn down (since, as mentioned before, housing depreciates). > * The metropolitan area of NY, population 20.3M, approved 27,000 units in 2012, but approvals != actual construction. Do you mean no housing was built in 2012?
- bobthepanda 5y ago
  So the way it works in NY IIRC, you can get an approval and not actually act on it, and the reason you can do this is because the approval can be sold with the property, which isn't an uncommon thing. NYC does not track construction starts like that, or at least not when that article was written

seanmcdirmid 5y ago

> * The 23 special wards of Tokyo, 8.9M people, built 110,000 new homes that year. Since housing is refreshed in Japan on a 20-30 year basis, you can't quote the number of housing built without comparing it to the number of housing torn down (since, as mentioned before, housing depreciates). > * The metropolitan area of NY, population 20.3M, approved 27,000 units in 2012, but approvals != actual construction. Do you mean no housing was built in 2012?

bobthepanda 5y ago
So the way it works in NY IIRC, you can get an approval and not actually act on it, and the reason you can do this is because the approval can be sold with the property, which isn't an uncommon thing. NYC does not track construction starts like that, or at least not when that article was written