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I defy the data [1]. There is too much complexity in that single example and the law of supply/demand has been proven too frequently for it to not make sense t

I defy the data [1]. There is too much complexity in that single example and the law of supply/demand has been proven too frequently for it to not make sense that increasing demand to meet supply would reduce cost. 1. For clarity, this phrasing is from here https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vrHRcEDMjZcx5Yfru/i-defy-the-data https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vrHRcEDMjZcx5Yfru/i-defy-the...

cyberax 2y ago
> I defy the data. Sorry. The reality doesn't care about your defiance. Upzoning does not lead to lower housing prices. Even the most extreme urbanists admit that: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2023/4/26/upzoning-might-not-lower-housing-costs-do-it-anyway https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2023/4/26/upzoning-might... > and the law of supply/demand has been proven too frequently Ah, here it is. Have you considered that there, you know, might be "too much complexity" for "Economy 101" to fully explain the situation? The _only_ way to decrease the housing prices is to BUILD MORE SUBURBS. Or even new cities entirely. You don't have any other options. Sorry again. Well, maybe one more: the Detroit route. Reduce the city population and the prices will go down.
- tacitusarc 2y ago
  Firstly, your link is focused on zoning changes, specifically how they are insufficient to prompt addition supply to be built. From your linked blog post: > Freemark finds extremely mixed and uncertain evidence for the effects of upzoning, and one of several reasons he identifies is that the link between upzoning and actual housing production is tenuous. In other words, “Are they allowed to build it?” is a different question from, “Are they building it?” Secondly, building more suburbs and more cities increases the supply… which indicates agreement that the price problem is one of insufficient supply. EDIT: To be perfectly clear, the data I disagree with is that increasing supply in Minneapolis failed to impact price. This is the contention of the comment I responded to, and it is fundamentally different from the claim that zoning changes fail to increase supply.
  - cyberax 2y ago
    > Firstly, your link is focused on zoning changes, specifically how they are insufficient to prompt addition supply to be built. Yeah. The misery pushers (urbanists) can't admit outright that their ideology is leading to disaster, can they? So they now need not only zoning restrictions lifted, but the state must also build housing and give it out to "deserving" people for cheap. > Secondly, building more suburbs and more cities increases the supply… which indicates agreement that the price problem is one of insufficient supply. I'm not arguing against supply-and-demand in general (I'm not a communist idiot). I'm arguing against the _density_ increases. > EDIT: To be perfectly clear, the data I disagree with is that increasing supply in Minneapolis failed to impact price. But it did. The real estate transaction index clearly shows that there were no positive effects from the new construction. Moreover, I analyzed all the real estate sales in the US, Canada, and parts of Europe since 1995. I have not found a single example of a large (>100k population) city that decreased the housing sale prices by increasing density. Even during the crash of 2007, the dense housing crashed less than comparative nearby sparse housing. The scholarly literature is also unambiguous. The best effects of density increases are either mild (transient effects on rent), or indirect (migration chains).
    - brailsafe 2y ago
      You keep referring to people who like cities that function as cities as "misery pushers" and then in the same breath doing as much as you can to create an association between increased density and all these hypothetical negative possibilities. Likewise it just seems as though you've developed some level of prejudice based on the negative experience you're contending with in your neighborhood, and then extrapolating that quite severely, because you think you've been lied to. It's tricky to reconcile how if you were inclined to be optimistic about the prospect of urbanism to begin with, you'd be so intensely and easily convinced otherwise, or surprised that the creation of an arbitrary higher density building didn't turn your low density town into European capital city overnight. Like how does it happen that you lived in no specific place in Europe for example, then to where you are now, and one thing gets built which convinces you that actually every city in Europe is and has always been wrong. Your chart shows two lines that seem to represent sales of something over time in nearby cities, which may or may not be relevant, but are at most a narrow slice of what one would need to look at in order to understand what's going on over in Minneapolis if anything. You then create a strawman who thinks the removal of zoning restrictions will automatically lead to a utopia in which we have no other human problems or economic systems to contend with, even going so far as to dismiss someone on the basis of a lacking argument against a claim that nobody made.
- tiahura 2y ago
  The _only_ way to decrease the housing prices is to BUILD MORE SUBURBS. Or even new cities entirely. Preach brother. Might I also add the possibility of encouraging migration from Metropolises to regional 100k - 200kish cities?
  - cyberax 2y ago
    Yup. It's pretty much the only way to fix the housing crisis. I think that 300k is the threshold for a good city size.
- verall 2y ago
  What about Austin, where they have aggressively upzoned and built, and now housing prices are down?
  - cyberax 2y ago
    Austin is an interesting case. It tripped me up a bit when I saw it. But it turned out that my prediction was correct because the Austin population went _down_ during the pandemic. Population: 2019 - 978,763 2022 - 975,418 2023 - 979,882 The overall Travis County population went up a bit. And the prices, in the places other than Austin, are also up. I can also give a prediction, if Austin population growth recovers (not a given), the price growth rate will quickly outpace the surrounding Travis County.
    - verall 2y ago
      Looking at the population of Austin proper is pretty silly here, and similar just looking at Travis. The city proper lost population from 2019-2020 as many cities did during the early pandemic, but grew each year since. The Austin metro area has grown every one of these years. In every comparable city in the country, housing prices are up. In Austin, they are down.
      - cyberax 2y ago
        > In every comparable city in the country, housing prices are up. In Austin, they are down. Now compare the population. Travis County population (sans Austin) went up, so the prices are also up. And Travis County actually has _more_ new units than Austin proper. The driver for the price decreases in Austin is the population drop, not the new construction.
        verall 2y ago
        Population dropped 2019-2020, but population has increased each year since 2020, both in Austin proper and austin greater metro area. Housing prices increased until about 2022 when they started dropping, and (along with rent) have been trending downwards since. If your point is, "construction has to outstrip population increase in order to decrease prices", then well, yeah, we agree fully. If your point is that huge amounts of new units going on the market in Austin does not have a significant impact on prices, I don't think that's supported by any evidence or makes any sense.
tacitusarc 2y ago
*increasing supply to meet demand

cyberax 2y ago

> I defy the data. Sorry. The reality doesn't care about your defiance. Upzoning does not lead to lower housing prices. Even the most extreme urbanists admit that: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2023/4/26/upzoning-might-not-lower-housing-costs-do-it-anyway https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2023/4/26/upzoning-might... > and the law of supply/demand has been proven too frequently Ah, here it is. Have you considered that there, you know, might be "too much complexity" for "Economy 101" to fully explain the situation? The _only_ way to decrease the housing prices is to BUILD MORE SUBURBS. Or even new cities entirely. You don't have any other options. Sorry again. Well, maybe one more: the Detroit route. Reduce the city population and the prices will go down.

tacitusarc 2y ago
Firstly, your link is focused on zoning changes, specifically how they are insufficient to prompt addition supply to be built. From your linked blog post: > Freemark finds extremely mixed and uncertain evidence for the effects of upzoning, and one of several reasons he identifies is that the link between upzoning and actual housing production is tenuous. In other words, “Are they allowed to build it?” is a different question from, “Are they building it?” Secondly, building more suburbs and more cities increases the supply… which indicates agreement that the price problem is one of insufficient supply. EDIT: To be perfectly clear, the data I disagree with is that increasing supply in Minneapolis failed to impact price. This is the contention of the comment I responded to, and it is fundamentally different from the claim that zoning changes fail to increase supply.
- cyberax 2y ago
  > Firstly, your link is focused on zoning changes, specifically how they are insufficient to prompt addition supply to be built. Yeah. The misery pushers (urbanists) can't admit outright that their ideology is leading to disaster, can they? So they now need not only zoning restrictions lifted, but the state must also build housing and give it out to "deserving" people for cheap. > Secondly, building more suburbs and more cities increases the supply… which indicates agreement that the price problem is one of insufficient supply. I'm not arguing against supply-and-demand in general (I'm not a communist idiot). I'm arguing against the _density_ increases. > EDIT: To be perfectly clear, the data I disagree with is that increasing supply in Minneapolis failed to impact price. But it did. The real estate transaction index clearly shows that there were no positive effects from the new construction. Moreover, I analyzed all the real estate sales in the US, Canada, and parts of Europe since 1995. I have not found a single example of a large (>100k population) city that decreased the housing sale prices by increasing density. Even during the crash of 2007, the dense housing crashed less than comparative nearby sparse housing. The scholarly literature is also unambiguous. The best effects of density increases are either mild (transient effects on rent), or indirect (migration chains).
  - brailsafe 2y ago
    You keep referring to people who like cities that function as cities as "misery pushers" and then in the same breath doing as much as you can to create an association between increased density and all these hypothetical negative possibilities. Likewise it just seems as though you've developed some level of prejudice based on the negative experience you're contending with in your neighborhood, and then extrapolating that quite severely, because you think you've been lied to. It's tricky to reconcile how if you were inclined to be optimistic about the prospect of urbanism to begin with, you'd be so intensely and easily convinced otherwise, or surprised that the creation of an arbitrary higher density building didn't turn your low density town into European capital city overnight. Like how does it happen that you lived in no specific place in Europe for example, then to where you are now, and one thing gets built which convinces you that actually every city in Europe is and has always been wrong. Your chart shows two lines that seem to represent sales of something over time in nearby cities, which may or may not be relevant, but are at most a narrow slice of what one would need to look at in order to understand what's going on over in Minneapolis if anything. You then create a strawman who thinks the removal of zoning restrictions will automatically lead to a utopia in which we have no other human problems or economic systems to contend with, even going so far as to dismiss someone on the basis of a lacking argument against a claim that nobody made.
tiahura 2y ago
The _only_ way to decrease the housing prices is to BUILD MORE SUBURBS. Or even new cities entirely. Preach brother. Might I also add the possibility of encouraging migration from Metropolises to regional 100k - 200kish cities?
- cyberax 2y ago
  Yup. It's pretty much the only way to fix the housing crisis. I think that 300k is the threshold for a good city size.
verall 2y ago
What about Austin, where they have aggressively upzoned and built, and now housing prices are down?
- cyberax 2y ago
  Austin is an interesting case. It tripped me up a bit when I saw it. But it turned out that my prediction was correct because the Austin population went _down_ during the pandemic. Population: 2019 - 978,763 2022 - 975,418 2023 - 979,882 The overall Travis County population went up a bit. And the prices, in the places other than Austin, are also up. I can also give a prediction, if Austin population growth recovers (not a given), the price growth rate will quickly outpace the surrounding Travis County.
  - verall 2y ago
    Looking at the population of Austin proper is pretty silly here, and similar just looking at Travis. The city proper lost population from 2019-2020 as many cities did during the early pandemic, but grew each year since. The Austin metro area has grown every one of these years. In every comparable city in the country, housing prices are up. In Austin, they are down.
    - cyberax 2y ago
      > In every comparable city in the country, housing prices are up. In Austin, they are down. Now compare the population. Travis County population (sans Austin) went up, so the prices are also up. And Travis County actually has _more_ new units than Austin proper. The driver for the price decreases in Austin is the population drop, not the new construction.
      - verall 2y ago
        Population dropped 2019-2020, but population has increased each year since 2020, both in Austin proper and austin greater metro area. Housing prices increased until about 2022 when they started dropping, and (along with rent) have been trending downwards since. If your point is, "construction has to outstrip population increase in order to decrease prices", then well, yeah, we agree fully. If your point is that huge amounts of new units going on the market in Austin does not have a significant impact on prices, I don't think that's supported by any evidence or makes any sense.

tacitusarc 2y ago

*increasing supply to meet demand