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Building more housing is like building more freeways. It doesn’t work. Within a generation, housing costs are back to normal Levels—but now everything is uglier
by 7e 3y ago
Building more housing is like building more freeways. It doesn’t work. Within a generation, housing costs are back to normal
Levels—but now everything is uglier, there is less nature, and the earth suffers. Urban jungles and tenement slums are not sustainable. Humans need a check to prevent them from overrunning the earth breeding. That check is habitat control.
- 0xBDB 3y ago"Building more housing is like building more freeways." Possibly. But what building freeways does exactly is itself not uncontroversial. The article in this HN thread isn't great, but some of the comments are at least thought-provoking. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39353710 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39353710
- aqme28 3y agoI don't believe that any of this is true. Building more housing does (provably) lower housing prices. And developed urban areas are more environmentally friendly than suburbs. People are going to live somewhere, and density actually has environmental benefits. But what is "habitat control"? I've never heard of that.
- 7e 3y agoLook beyond a five or ten year time horizon. More housing has been built continuously in the US for hundreds of years. Berkeley has existed for more than 150 yesrs. Did all of this building lower prices? No. It just encouraged people to have more children or to move into an area. Prices then move back up to the equilibrium point.
- tekla 3y agohttps://www.irp.wisc.edu/resource/many-rural-americans-are-still-left-behind/ https://www.irp.wisc.edu/resource/many-rural-americans-are-s... Your point?
- aqme28 3y agoIf anything, building more housing reduces slums. edit: The parent comment was edited after my reply, so now mine is a nonsequitor
- jvanderbot 3y agoRemoving blockers to having more children and opening up more availability for people to move into their desired areas are good things.
- aqme28 3y agoBut we need people to have children. Discouraging people from having children by limiting the housing stock would be terrible for the economy and for people.
- analognoise 3y agoThe “Most Dystopian Point” award goes to… Worst infant mortality, no healthcare, infinite wars every 20 years, dual incomes required, forever chemicals, highly processed food, no mandated maternity leave, wealth disparity worse than the French Revolution, on and on and on. Maybe we SHOULD destroy the economy ?
- aqme28 3y agoI just think that depopulation via restricting housing would make things a lot worse than any dystopia we’re currently facing
- analognoise 3y agoThat’s an excellent point.
- bluejekyll 3y ago> habitat control. Not really, if you want to reduce the human population, ie lower the birth rate, it’s really about education: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3449224/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3449224/ Additionally, the problem we have is sprawl, and upzoning fixes spraw. After that we then have the problem of how people get around, and the reliance on the car in the US and other places is a major problem. Most urban downtowns are only unpleasant when they are mixed with dangerous levels of car traffic.