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This article is pure bullshit. The lowest-cost housing is not in dense slums. It's in the rural areas and smaller cities. There you can buy a small single-fami

This article is pure bullshit. The lowest-cost housing is not in dense slums. It's in the rural areas and smaller cities. There you can buy a small single-family home for the cost of an SRO in NYC. By adding more SROs the city housing will get MORE EXPENSIVE in the end. They won't solve anything, they'll just create more misery.

pcaharrier 1y ago
You're saying that increasing supply (all else being equal) will increase prices? Seems like that turns standard econ on its head, so can you help me understand who you reached that conclusion?
- cyberax 1y ago
  > You're saying that increasing supply (all else being equal) will increase prices? Yep. Exactly. With the caveat: the increase happens by increasing the _density_. > Seems like that turns standard econ on its head, so can you help me understand who you reached that conclusion? Here's another example. Suppose you give a billion dollars to everyone. Will everyone just become rich? Housing is similar. When you build denser housing, it increases the attractiveness of the area for employers. They get access to a larger labor pool, so companies near dense housing are long-term more competitive. This in turn increases the housing price, as workers want to live closer to employers. Rinse, wash, repeat. The end result: no large city managed to lower down housing costs by increasing density. It's a simple verifiable fact. Edit: I checked data for Western Europe, Russia, US, Japan. It's possible that some citi in India or Malaysia managed to do that. But I don't have data for them.
  - pcaharrier 1y ago
    I see what you're saying: all else will not remain equal. Your argument is that any increase in supply will always be more than offset by a corresponding increase in demand.
    - cyberax 1y ago
      That is correct. An abstract spherical city in vacuum might be able to lower prices by building more. Or it's possible in a fantasy scenario where you suddenly drop a million housing units onto a city from orbit. But cities don't exist in vacuum. And building new housing is always slow, so you can feasibly grow housing stock in a large city only by single-digit percentages YoY.
ilamont 1y ago
> The lowest-cost housing is not in dense slums. It's in the rural areas and smaller cities. You can buy houses in rural New York for $100k-$150k. In St. Paul, it's not hard to find a house for $300k. Yet most of the discussion revolves around fixing the situation in coastal cities, instead of working on incentives or infrastructure that would encourage people to see what's available in the hundreds of counties and smaller cities that have ample affordable stock.
- kyralis 1y ago
  Living in a rural area is not actually either cheap or easy. You need the skills to either profit off the land, which is not a trivial thing, or you to have a job that will allow you to afford to commute. What incentives are you imagining, relative to reducing the housing cost burden in areas that already have many of those incentives (for instance, access to easy irregular work or income sources)?
  - cyberax 1y ago
    > Living in a rural area is not actually either cheap or easy. Who's talking about rural areas? There are plenty of small cities with ~100k population. With the WFH, it's entirely feasible to live there. But no, we're spiraling into an ever more toxic housing density/cost pit.
    - kyralis 1y ago
      The parent is talking about rural areas: > You can buy houses in rural New York for $100k-$150k. But for your comment, what percentage of the population do you believe qualifies for WFH? Do you think the population at risk of homelessness does? Are we going to see WFH hotel check in desks, restaurant servers, and other manual work soon? Certainly if you have a well-paying WFH job you can work from nearly anywhere. I'm an example! I live in a rural area, precisely because I have a WFH job that enables it. But I still acknowledge that I'm that exception, not the rule.
      - 1y ago

pcaharrier 1y ago

You're saying that increasing supply (all else being equal) will increase prices? Seems like that turns standard econ on its head, so can you help me understand who you reached that conclusion?

cyberax 1y ago
> You're saying that increasing supply (all else being equal) will increase prices? Yep. Exactly. With the caveat: the increase happens by increasing the _density_. > Seems like that turns standard econ on its head, so can you help me understand who you reached that conclusion? Here's another example. Suppose you give a billion dollars to everyone. Will everyone just become rich? Housing is similar. When you build denser housing, it increases the attractiveness of the area for employers. They get access to a larger labor pool, so companies near dense housing are long-term more competitive. This in turn increases the housing price, as workers want to live closer to employers. Rinse, wash, repeat. The end result: no large city managed to lower down housing costs by increasing density. It's a simple verifiable fact. Edit: I checked data for Western Europe, Russia, US, Japan. It's possible that some citi in India or Malaysia managed to do that. But I don't have data for them.
- pcaharrier 1y ago
  I see what you're saying: all else will not remain equal. Your argument is that any increase in supply will always be more than offset by a corresponding increase in demand.
  - cyberax 1y ago
    That is correct. An abstract spherical city in vacuum might be able to lower prices by building more. Or it's possible in a fantasy scenario where you suddenly drop a million housing units onto a city from orbit. But cities don't exist in vacuum. And building new housing is always slow, so you can feasibly grow housing stock in a large city only by single-digit percentages YoY.

ilamont 1y ago

> The lowest-cost housing is not in dense slums. It's in the rural areas and smaller cities. You can buy houses in rural New York for $100k-$150k. In St. Paul, it's not hard to find a house for $300k. Yet most of the discussion revolves around fixing the situation in coastal cities, instead of working on incentives or infrastructure that would encourage people to see what's available in the hundreds of counties and smaller cities that have ample affordable stock.

kyralis 1y ago
Living in a rural area is not actually either cheap or easy. You need the skills to either profit off the land, which is not a trivial thing, or you to have a job that will allow you to afford to commute. What incentives are you imagining, relative to reducing the housing cost burden in areas that already have many of those incentives (for instance, access to easy irregular work or income sources)?
- cyberax 1y ago
  > Living in a rural area is not actually either cheap or easy. Who's talking about rural areas? There are plenty of small cities with ~100k population. With the WFH, it's entirely feasible to live there. But no, we're spiraling into an ever more toxic housing density/cost pit.
  - kyralis 1y ago
    The parent is talking about rural areas: > You can buy houses in rural New York for $100k-$150k. But for your comment, what percentage of the population do you believe qualifies for WFH? Do you think the population at risk of homelessness does? Are we going to see WFH hotel check in desks, restaurant servers, and other manual work soon? Certainly if you have a well-paying WFH job you can work from nearly anywhere. I'm an example! I live in a rural area, precisely because I have a WFH job that enables it. But I still acknowledge that I'm that exception, not the rule.
    - 1y ago