5 ms·

I feel like this (along with many discussions about urban housing) slightly misses the real issue. A lot of these discussions center around how to make housing

I feel like this (along with many discussions about urban housing) slightly misses the real issue. A lot of these discussions center around how to make housing affordable in cities and whether denser construction leads to lower housing costs or higher housing costs. But cities don't exist to minimize housing costs. They exist to maximize opportunities: job opportunities, dating opportunities, friendship opportunities, cultural opportunities, and so on. They exist to bring as many people together as easily as possible. The way that an urban economist would put it is that fundamentally cities are job markets. I would put it a little more broadly and say that cities are opportunities markets. For that reason housing in a dense urban environment will never be as affordable as housing out in rural North Dakota. If you build more housing in a city, more people move there, and the city becomes more desirable as a result, is the city better or worse off for having built the housing?

chii 3y ago
I think you got it the wrong way around - cities _form_ around opportunities, rather than produce them. Initially, geographic advantage (such as being near harbour, river, or some other geographic feature) gives a settlement that's not yet a city a big advantage in attracting more people there. This in turn, forces the city to grow as more people cram in. To artificially build denser by policy doesn't produce opportunities - those opportunities would have to be there first! And it's this "expensiveness" of creating more accomodation in the city that causes the city to expand.
- vasco 3y ago
  Two are not mutually exclusive. A city can be formed around the "opportunity" of a river or whatever a thousand years ago, and yet provide new opportunities like tinder having loads of people nearby nowadays.
  - tap-snap-or-nap 3y ago
    Similarly, cities decline after loss of opportunities and opportunities decline after cities make losses.
  - csomar 3y ago
    The people themselves rarely create the opportunity. Take the Bay Area/SF for example, the opportunity is the digital economy and not the people who are mining it. That is, you can have a bunch of software developers (or miners), but if there is no gold to mine, they'll just sit idle (and eventually disperse). Most cities around the world (except some cities in the US) are "strategically" located near a river or on shore. Because of that, pretty much the whole world live near a river or sea. The most strategically located cities "become" a trading hub and these days have become large cities. It's well worth mentioning, however, that if the people in the city (who where strategically located for trading) didn't adapt to the changes in the world conditions, then these cities simply disappear or become much less relevant. Many cities of the world would have lost this privilege due to digitalization and the sea becoming safer.
    - spacebanana7 3y ago
      > The people themselves rarely create the opportunity. It's impossible to separate the people from the social institutions which do create the opportunity in the services sector which dominates modern advanced economies. In the Bay Area/SF the digital economy is defined by the ecosystem of big tech, VCs, thousands of software engineers and maybe tens of thousands of support services like accountants.
    - achenet 3y ago
      > That is, you can have a bunch of software developers (or miners), but if there is no gold to mine, they'll just sit idle (and eventually disperse). not sure this is a good example - while it's true for actual gold mining, in the case of software developers, having other software devs around (plus also good computers, which you could argue is like gold) can be an opportunity in itself - look at all the devtools startups that happen in the Bay Area. A large group of people is an opportunity in itself.
- rippercushions 3y ago
  There are lots of planned cities that are natural experiments in this: Brasilia, Canberra, Ottawa, Abuja etc. They all show that yes, it is possible to "build it and they will come", but it's hugely expensive, takes a long, long time (decades) to get to critical mass, and produced mixed results at best, eg Brasilia's original strictly separated zoning has been widely panned as a disaster. And I'm pretty sure all of those would still suffer gravely if the capital was ever moved out.
  - nirimda 3y ago
    > There are lots of planned cities that are natural experiments in this... They ... produced mixed results at best, eg Brasilia's original strictly separated zoning has been widely panned as a disaster. I'm not sure if there's been some slight shift of topic here. By "planned", I think we originally meant "deliberately built in relatively undeveloped land". But then you mention as an example of a failure of deliberately building a city in relatively undeveloped land, an example of a failure of micromanagement (also a kind of planning, but one that is completely orthogonal to the circumstances of the city's founding). So does Brasilia's original strictly separated zoning show the problems of strictly separated zoning, or does it show the problems of deliberately building a city where none was before? It's possible we just had the wrong idea of what you need to have a great city during the 20th century isn't it? Washington DC, for instance, is an artificial city with top-down planning, but it was built at a time when people had different ideas about what made a great city, and it doesn't really seem to be a failure. It doesn't even appear on your list, despite being the case that served as a template for your other examples. (I don't know. I don't know anything about Brasilia other than that it is the capital of Brazil.)
    - midoridensha 3y ago
      >Washington DC, for instance, is an artificial city with top-down planning, but it was built at a time when people had different ideas about what made a great city, and it doesn't really seem to be a failure. As I recall, DC was designed by George Washington himself (probably with help from his friends), back in the late 1700s, but the city as a whole was not: what they designed was the Federal district only. The Capitol, the White House, the National Mall between them, etc. Over time, this grew with the additions of the Smithsonian buildings and many other things. The thing is, no one lives there. That district is entirely devoid of residential areas in fact, and with very little commercial stuff if any. All that stuff is mostly to the north, and I don't see any evidence of it being planned top-down at all, except maybe the original street layout which is largely a simple grid, with lettered streets running east-west, and a few interesting things like Dupont Circle (which probably came later). DC is definitely not a place I'd call a "master planned city" or "artificial city"; it's evolved far too much in the last 300+ years.
- em-bee 3y ago
  it really depends on the kind of opportunities you are looking for. if i want to form a band or play in a music session then i need to find other players. a larger city is more likely to have players, so the opportunity does not exist until the people are there. same goes for creating a hackerspace or any other group around a topic that is only of interest to a small part of the population. also networking. there are no opportunities to meet people unless a city is large enough to have events. movies or theaters, museums, specialty shopping (like a comic book store). anything like that is only sustainable with a large enough local population.
- spacebanana7 3y ago
  > To artificially build denser by policy doesn't produce opportunities - those opportunities would have to be there first! Density is an effective way of substituting for transport speed, which is the binding constraint on many opportunities. The number of coffee shops I can choose to visit on my 15 minute break after stand up is limited by the density of the urban environment, for a given mode of transport. Many public, private and social enterprises have this dynamic. A police station needs to be within a certain travel distance of the outskirts of their community to be useful, likewise a supermarket or nightclub. There is an argument that, at a certain extreme point, density might have such a negative impact on transport speed that it might increase transit time. I'm personally split on this issue. Density definitely hurts motor vehicle speed but has little effect on walking speed and might even improve rail speed.
  - raybb 3y ago
    > Many public, private and social enterprises have this dynamic. What is the dynamic in "this dynamic" ? Do you have an examples with social enterprises?
    - spacebanana7 3y ago
      > What is the dynamic in "this dynamic" I intended the phrase "this dynamic" to capture the relationship between transport time and viability of the enterprise. > Do you have an examples with social enterprises? Sure thing. Food banks, soup kitchens and homeless shelters all need to be within a viable transport time of the people they intend to help.
amadeuspagel 3y ago
> If you build more housing in a city, more people move there, and the city becomes more desirable as a result, is the city better or worse off for having built the housing? Is the existing population of the city better or worse off? That's the question that matters politically, since only the existing population gets to vote in city elections.
konschubert 3y ago
I am glad that this is the top comment. Imagine you build housing such that 5 Million more people can move to Boston. Imagine that housing prices do not go down, and do not go down in other cities either. That implies that that 5 million more people are now earning Boston-level salaries and 5 million more people were able to make the personal choice to move to Boston. These 5 million people are on average doing higher-productivity jobs than before, which means economic growth. Yet at the same time, these 5 million people now have a lower ecological footprint than they would have had if they stayed where they lived before. These 5 million people are arguably better off, and the rest of society is also better off.
- pdimitar 3y ago
  Call me stupid (I am not an economist) but I can't see how your conclusions follow from one another. > That implies that that 5 million more people are now earning Boston-level salaries and 5 million more people were able to make the personal choice to move to Boston. ...How did those 5 million better-paid jobs got created? How did the 5 million people connect with them? Not everyone is 18-25 y/o you know, a lot of people know one profession and don't want to ever learn another (assuming the jobs pertain to a different profession, but I'd say that's a safe bet that not all of them will cover the professions of these 5 million people). > These 5 million people are on average doing higher-productivity jobs than before, which means economic growth. Better salary rarely correlates with better productivity in my experience and observations. People love their titles and prestige and are chasing after them just for the extra salaries they bring. And even if we ignore that, a lot of companies pad budgets for well-known reasons: if you don't spend your entire department's budget then it will be reduced in the next quarter or fiscal year, and you as a manager are very likely to get skipped when handing out bonuses. This has often led to managers hiring expensive consultants that barely do anything. These people are laughing their way to the bank and the economy gains nothing from it (those consultants will not reinvest 100% of the money in the local economy; I'd count it as a huge win if they reinvest even 20% but I have no data proving that they do or that they don't). So yes, while the new 5 million people could have better salaries, that says almost nothing about productivity or helping the economy at large with this theorized increased productivity. > Yet at the same time, these 5 million people now have a lower ecological footprint than they would have had if they stayed where they lived before. I am most of all challenging this one. I've known a lot of people in rural areas years ago, some of them pile wood and small amounts of coal for 3-5 years ahead for prices I'd find laughable and a rounding error in my 3-month expense budget -- and before we talk about ecological impact or CO2 footprint, most of this wood was cut 5 years ago, it's not removing new forests. They manage their heating extremely efficiently. It really opened my eyes how much us the city people look down on others in terms of ecology when in fact we know next to nothing about how is our local electricity procured, how much CO2 it releases in the atmosphere, and how is it even subsidized (a huge topic for another thread / time). So obviously this is down to context (and I have no idea where does Boston get its electricity, or any such city that your idea might pertain to) but to me this is not as clear and cut as you make it sound. ...And that's not even mentioning rural people getting solar panels and literally having 5-10% of their winter power bill during the summer. ......And it's also not mentioning that some of them did a combination of a family picnic + were gathering dead wood / twigs / dry leaves sometimes and these easily accounted for no less than 5% of all their heating in the cold months. This is not destroying the ecological system, it's merely being super efficient by removing mostly useless bio matter (and very far from such a huge scale that it will hamper enriching the soil, before you say it!). > These 5 million people are arguably better off, and the rest of society is also better off. As you yourself alluded to, that's not a given, like at all. 5 million people moving away from rural areas could arguably leave 10+ million elderly people without care or even ability to have their kids arrive to their location quickly if they have a medical emergency. Which part of "society" is better off? City real estate renters for sure. Who else? Local sandwich shops, laundromats, coffee joints, ice-cream truck? I'll give you all of those and I like how city people inter-mingle both in terms of physical presence and capital. But I remain skeptical that society as a huge entity is actually better off. --- IMO your take is a very idealistic one. Still, I do my best not to sound like I am attacking you, I am kind of confused that I can't see a single correlation in your string of assertions and I am curious if you can back them up with something more than aggregated (and very diluted) historical statistics.
iudqnolq 3y ago
I feel your discussion uses the wrong metric. The appropriate level for measuring wellbeing is national*. If making a comparatively small number of long-term city residents in a little worse off improves the lives of many citizens of the nation it should be clearly worthwhile. Many cities have obvious low-hanging fruit. SF is full of 1-3 story housing that could easily be made much denser. Instead we've created a system where the lucky few whose parents bought housing years ago in desirable areas inherit a ticket to opportunity in a city. That's fundamentally contrary to the ideals of the American Dream. *Well I actually think this should be global, so I support open borders. But that's a tangent here.
PurpleRamen 3y ago
I think you are missing the point. The question of house pricing comes mainly from too many people not able to afford proper living condition, despite the better opportunities. Of course will a house in the middle of nowhere cheaper than those in better environments. But what worth has the better environment, when most people can't utilize it? At the end, this situation will lead to multiple other problems, like people avoiding overpriced areas, and instead travelling long distances to their workplace in those overpriced areas, which means they waste energy and pollute the environment, have less time for their family & socializing, and so on... So it doesn't matter for what reason a city might exists or not. The question is which burden it puts on society and to which future it leads.
bluGill 3y ago
Housing is expensive in rural north Dakota as well. Land is cheap which makes things cheaper. However your choice is older houses that are worn out, or spending more than the house is worth to build a new one.
deelly 3y ago
I`m really sorry, but did you read the article? > But Manhattan and London have the highest house prices in their respective countries, primarily because of their density and the opportunities density provides. .... > But if becoming just as big as Manhattan or London would make Oakland more expensive, shouldn’t we assume that a little step in that direction would make it a little bit more expensive? .... > No; I think the missing insight is that there’s some pool of geographically mobile Americans1 who are looking for new housing (or who might start looking if the right situation presented itself).

chii 3y ago

I think you got it the wrong way around - cities _form_ around opportunities, rather than produce them. Initially, geographic advantage (such as being near harbour, river, or some other geographic feature) gives a settlement that's not yet a city a big advantage in attracting more people there. This in turn, forces the city to grow as more people cram in. To artificially build denser by policy doesn't produce opportunities - those opportunities would have to be there first! And it's this "expensiveness" of creating more accomodation in the city that causes the city to expand.

vasco 3y ago
Two are not mutually exclusive. A city can be formed around the "opportunity" of a river or whatever a thousand years ago, and yet provide new opportunities like tinder having loads of people nearby nowadays.
- tap-snap-or-nap 3y ago
  Similarly, cities decline after loss of opportunities and opportunities decline after cities make losses.
- csomar 3y ago
  The people themselves rarely create the opportunity. Take the Bay Area/SF for example, the opportunity is the digital economy and not the people who are mining it. That is, you can have a bunch of software developers (or miners), but if there is no gold to mine, they'll just sit idle (and eventually disperse). Most cities around the world (except some cities in the US) are "strategically" located near a river or on shore. Because of that, pretty much the whole world live near a river or sea. The most strategically located cities "become" a trading hub and these days have become large cities. It's well worth mentioning, however, that if the people in the city (who where strategically located for trading) didn't adapt to the changes in the world conditions, then these cities simply disappear or become much less relevant. Many cities of the world would have lost this privilege due to digitalization and the sea becoming safer.
  - spacebanana7 3y ago
    > The people themselves rarely create the opportunity. It's impossible to separate the people from the social institutions which do create the opportunity in the services sector which dominates modern advanced economies. In the Bay Area/SF the digital economy is defined by the ecosystem of big tech, VCs, thousands of software engineers and maybe tens of thousands of support services like accountants.
  - achenet 3y ago
    > That is, you can have a bunch of software developers (or miners), but if there is no gold to mine, they'll just sit idle (and eventually disperse). not sure this is a good example - while it's true for actual gold mining, in the case of software developers, having other software devs around (plus also good computers, which you could argue is like gold) can be an opportunity in itself - look at all the devtools startups that happen in the Bay Area. A large group of people is an opportunity in itself.
rippercushions 3y ago
There are lots of planned cities that are natural experiments in this: Brasilia, Canberra, Ottawa, Abuja etc. They all show that yes, it is possible to "build it and they will come", but it's hugely expensive, takes a long, long time (decades) to get to critical mass, and produced mixed results at best, eg Brasilia's original strictly separated zoning has been widely panned as a disaster. And I'm pretty sure all of those would still suffer gravely if the capital was ever moved out.
- nirimda 3y ago
  > There are lots of planned cities that are natural experiments in this... They ... produced mixed results at best, eg Brasilia's original strictly separated zoning has been widely panned as a disaster. I'm not sure if there's been some slight shift of topic here. By "planned", I think we originally meant "deliberately built in relatively undeveloped land". But then you mention as an example of a failure of deliberately building a city in relatively undeveloped land, an example of a failure of micromanagement (also a kind of planning, but one that is completely orthogonal to the circumstances of the city's founding). So does Brasilia's original strictly separated zoning show the problems of strictly separated zoning, or does it show the problems of deliberately building a city where none was before? It's possible we just had the wrong idea of what you need to have a great city during the 20th century isn't it? Washington DC, for instance, is an artificial city with top-down planning, but it was built at a time when people had different ideas about what made a great city, and it doesn't really seem to be a failure. It doesn't even appear on your list, despite being the case that served as a template for your other examples. (I don't know. I don't know anything about Brasilia other than that it is the capital of Brazil.)
  - midoridensha 3y ago
    >Washington DC, for instance, is an artificial city with top-down planning, but it was built at a time when people had different ideas about what made a great city, and it doesn't really seem to be a failure. As I recall, DC was designed by George Washington himself (probably with help from his friends), back in the late 1700s, but the city as a whole was not: what they designed was the Federal district only. The Capitol, the White House, the National Mall between them, etc. Over time, this grew with the additions of the Smithsonian buildings and many other things. The thing is, no one lives there. That district is entirely devoid of residential areas in fact, and with very little commercial stuff if any. All that stuff is mostly to the north, and I don't see any evidence of it being planned top-down at all, except maybe the original street layout which is largely a simple grid, with lettered streets running east-west, and a few interesting things like Dupont Circle (which probably came later). DC is definitely not a place I'd call a "master planned city" or "artificial city"; it's evolved far too much in the last 300+ years.
em-bee 3y ago
it really depends on the kind of opportunities you are looking for. if i want to form a band or play in a music session then i need to find other players. a larger city is more likely to have players, so the opportunity does not exist until the people are there. same goes for creating a hackerspace or any other group around a topic that is only of interest to a small part of the population. also networking. there are no opportunities to meet people unless a city is large enough to have events. movies or theaters, museums, specialty shopping (like a comic book store). anything like that is only sustainable with a large enough local population.
spacebanana7 3y ago
> To artificially build denser by policy doesn't produce opportunities - those opportunities would have to be there first! Density is an effective way of substituting for transport speed, which is the binding constraint on many opportunities. The number of coffee shops I can choose to visit on my 15 minute break after stand up is limited by the density of the urban environment, for a given mode of transport. Many public, private and social enterprises have this dynamic. A police station needs to be within a certain travel distance of the outskirts of their community to be useful, likewise a supermarket or nightclub. There is an argument that, at a certain extreme point, density might have such a negative impact on transport speed that it might increase transit time. I'm personally split on this issue. Density definitely hurts motor vehicle speed but has little effect on walking speed and might even improve rail speed.
- raybb 3y ago
  > Many public, private and social enterprises have this dynamic. What is the dynamic in "this dynamic" ? Do you have an examples with social enterprises?
  - spacebanana7 3y ago
    > What is the dynamic in "this dynamic" I intended the phrase "this dynamic" to capture the relationship between transport time and viability of the enterprise. > Do you have an examples with social enterprises? Sure thing. Food banks, soup kitchens and homeless shelters all need to be within a viable transport time of the people they intend to help.

amadeuspagel 3y ago

> If you build more housing in a city, more people move there, and the city becomes more desirable as a result, is the city better or worse off for having built the housing? Is the existing population of the city better or worse off? That's the question that matters politically, since only the existing population gets to vote in city elections.

konschubert 3y ago

I am glad that this is the top comment. Imagine you build housing such that 5 Million more people can move to Boston. Imagine that housing prices do not go down, and do not go down in other cities either. That implies that that 5 million more people are now earning Boston-level salaries and 5 million more people were able to make the personal choice to move to Boston. These 5 million people are on average doing higher-productivity jobs than before, which means economic growth. Yet at the same time, these 5 million people now have a lower ecological footprint than they would have had if they stayed where they lived before. These 5 million people are arguably better off, and the rest of society is also better off.

pdimitar 3y ago
Call me stupid (I am not an economist) but I can't see how your conclusions follow from one another. > That implies that that 5 million more people are now earning Boston-level salaries and 5 million more people were able to make the personal choice to move to Boston. ...How did those 5 million better-paid jobs got created? How did the 5 million people connect with them? Not everyone is 18-25 y/o you know, a lot of people know one profession and don't want to ever learn another (assuming the jobs pertain to a different profession, but I'd say that's a safe bet that not all of them will cover the professions of these 5 million people). > These 5 million people are on average doing higher-productivity jobs than before, which means economic growth. Better salary rarely correlates with better productivity in my experience and observations. People love their titles and prestige and are chasing after them just for the extra salaries they bring. And even if we ignore that, a lot of companies pad budgets for well-known reasons: if you don't spend your entire department's budget then it will be reduced in the next quarter or fiscal year, and you as a manager are very likely to get skipped when handing out bonuses. This has often led to managers hiring expensive consultants that barely do anything. These people are laughing their way to the bank and the economy gains nothing from it (those consultants will not reinvest 100% of the money in the local economy; I'd count it as a huge win if they reinvest even 20% but I have no data proving that they do or that they don't). So yes, while the new 5 million people could have better salaries, that says almost nothing about productivity or helping the economy at large with this theorized increased productivity. > Yet at the same time, these 5 million people now have a lower ecological footprint than they would have had if they stayed where they lived before. I am most of all challenging this one. I've known a lot of people in rural areas years ago, some of them pile wood and small amounts of coal for 3-5 years ahead for prices I'd find laughable and a rounding error in my 3-month expense budget -- and before we talk about ecological impact or CO2 footprint, most of this wood was cut 5 years ago, it's not removing new forests. They manage their heating extremely efficiently. It really opened my eyes how much us the city people look down on others in terms of ecology when in fact we know next to nothing about how is our local electricity procured, how much CO2 it releases in the atmosphere, and how is it even subsidized (a huge topic for another thread / time). So obviously this is down to context (and I have no idea where does Boston get its electricity, or any such city that your idea might pertain to) but to me this is not as clear and cut as you make it sound. ...And that's not even mentioning rural people getting solar panels and literally having 5-10% of their winter power bill during the summer. ......And it's also not mentioning that some of them did a combination of a family picnic + were gathering dead wood / twigs / dry leaves sometimes and these easily accounted for no less than 5% of all their heating in the cold months. This is not destroying the ecological system, it's merely being super efficient by removing mostly useless bio matter (and very far from such a huge scale that it will hamper enriching the soil, before you say it!). > These 5 million people are arguably better off, and the rest of society is also better off. As you yourself alluded to, that's not a given, like at all. 5 million people moving away from rural areas could arguably leave 10+ million elderly people without care or even ability to have their kids arrive to their location quickly if they have a medical emergency. Which part of "society" is better off? City real estate renters for sure. Who else? Local sandwich shops, laundromats, coffee joints, ice-cream truck? I'll give you all of those and I like how city people inter-mingle both in terms of physical presence and capital. But I remain skeptical that society as a huge entity is actually better off. --- IMO your take is a very idealistic one. Still, I do my best not to sound like I am attacking you, I am kind of confused that I can't see a single correlation in your string of assertions and I am curious if you can back them up with something more than aggregated (and very diluted) historical statistics.

iudqnolq 3y ago

I feel your discussion uses the wrong metric. The appropriate level for measuring wellbeing is national*. If making a comparatively small number of long-term city residents in a little worse off improves the lives of many citizens of the nation it should be clearly worthwhile. Many cities have obvious low-hanging fruit. SF is full of 1-3 story housing that could easily be made much denser. Instead we've created a system where the lucky few whose parents bought housing years ago in desirable areas inherit a ticket to opportunity in a city. That's fundamentally contrary to the ideals of the American Dream. *Well I actually think this should be global, so I support open borders. But that's a tangent here.

PurpleRamen 3y ago

I think you are missing the point. The question of house pricing comes mainly from too many people not able to afford proper living condition, despite the better opportunities. Of course will a house in the middle of nowhere cheaper than those in better environments. But what worth has the better environment, when most people can't utilize it? At the end, this situation will lead to multiple other problems, like people avoiding overpriced areas, and instead travelling long distances to their workplace in those overpriced areas, which means they waste energy and pollute the environment, have less time for their family & socializing, and so on... So it doesn't matter for what reason a city might exists or not. The question is which burden it puts on society and to which future it leads.

bluGill 3y ago

Housing is expensive in rural north Dakota as well. Land is cheap which makes things cheaper. However your choice is older houses that are worn out, or spending more than the house is worth to build a new one.

deelly 3y ago

I`m really sorry, but did you read the article? > But Manhattan and London have the highest house prices in their respective countries, primarily because of their density and the opportunities density provides. .... > But if becoming just as big as Manhattan or London would make Oakland more expensive, shouldn’t we assume that a little step in that direction would make it a little bit more expensive? .... > No; I think the missing insight is that there’s some pool of geographically mobile Americans1 who are looking for new housing (or who might start looking if the right situation presented itself).