7 ms·

The solution is pretty simple: build and unreasonable amount of housing. And entirely new cities. America has enough land. We could build new infrastructure, gi

The solution is pretty simple: build and unreasonable amount of housing. And entirely new cities. America has enough land. We could build new infrastructure, give people lots of land or build houses like we did in the 40s and 50s. Of the price of a house was brought down to 1x the annual salary of the median individual income some of these problems wouldn’t exist. We need to flood the system with investment and inventory.

epsteingpt 4mo ago
See Detroit mid-2010s for why massive overbuilding isn't a good strategy here.
- knowaveragejoe 4mo ago
  Can you explain more? What happened in Detroit in the mid 2010s, how did itreverse course after that?
  - epsteingpt 4mo ago
    Detroit was the hub of the auto industry. Outsourcing and foreign competition hollowed out the central city (which deliberately didn't have public transit) and left gigantic abandoned houses and skyscrapers throughout. There has been massive public investment and popular support to cause a revival of sorts in the city and is a success story. Go look at some photos from like 2010-2014.
    - Retric 4mo ago
      Such short term issues from massive economic collapse suggests building more housing works.
    - digitaltrees 4mo ago
      This happened throughout North Carolina where I live when textiles and furniture manufacturing was off shored. I assure you it wasn’t over building that caused the same outcome. It’s almost like the is an alternate explanation that is the common thread. What could it be?
    - registeredcorn 4mo ago
      How was the work outsourced around that timeframe? Do they no longer have an auto-industry at all in Detroit, or is it just greatly reduced?
      - vel0city 4mo ago
        Detroit was pretty much the place where cars were designed and manufactured in the US at one point in time. The highest producing factories, the engineering, the management, most of it happened practically inside the city. Over time these auto manufacturers opened plants on lower cost of living places, spreading out across the Midwest while a lot of the engineering and management still took place in Detroit. People often point to foreign competition for the downfall of urban Detroit but the writing was on the wall and decay starting well before foreign imports made a big splash. Between 1945 and 1957, GM, Ford, and Chrysler built 25 brand-new auto plants in the Detroit metro area. Not a single one was built inside the city limits. They weren't building these factories overseas (yet), they were building them in cheaper parts of the US. Detroit lost hundreds of thousands of well-paying factory jobs well before Volkswagen and Toyota started selling things in real numbers in the 1960s.
      - digitaltrees 4mo ago
        The great lakes cities were the wealthiest most influential region for a period of time. Go watch movies from the 80s. Detroit was the industrial heart of America. There are lots of factors but broadly characterizing them as globalization is generally fair. Some included: The rise of japanese cars added competition but they were held at bay by import restrictions and the American preference for massive cars until the gas shortages in the 70s, the trend towards efficient capital meant most industrial firms switched to prioritizing their more profitable financing arms, Reagan liberalized international trade that let foreign imports into the US market, NAFTA moving manufacturing to mexico and canada, companies moving manufacturing to non union states in the south, then moving the parts supply chain abroad.
  - CPLX 4mo ago
    It happened over a longer period obviously, and what happened is the US adopted a failed industrial policy that saw our core manufacturing base shipped to China for the benefit of Wall Street and the financial sector.
    - dgoldstein0 4mo ago
      Globalization wasn't a loss for all of America - the benefit of shipping manufacturing overseas was that the resulting imports were cheaper than producing domestically. After all if they weren't, people would've preferred to buy domestic. So it was a net win for the consumer via cheaper goods, but came at the expense of Detroit, Pittsburgh and other "rust belt" cities & communities. We're still grappling with the consequences. We should've invested in transitioning those workers to comparable or better jobs but the ball got completely dropped on that.
      - CPLX 4mo ago
        It wasn’t a net win for the consumer. The consumer is now much worse off than before and our country is weaker. It was just a mistake to allow ourselves to be ruled by the financial sector.
        digitaltrees 4mo ago
        I thought that as well. But the benefits of cheaper goods when manufacturing is shift elsewhere comes at the cost if the future innovations that follow manufacturing. American businesses forget that happening to the British when we took over manufacturing for England. Now China and Mexico have innovations we lack because their engineering has access to the assembly lines and see where innovations need to happen.
      - mrguyorama 4mo ago
        If your purchasing power is cut in half because you lost your manufacturing job and had to replace it with running a cash register, but the cost of toys also dropped in half (but not things like food and housing, which doubled in price), are you actually better off? No. Average Americans are poorer now than they were before they could buy everything at Walmart. As long as housing continues to be a "Line must go up" investment, Americans will continue to become poorer as more and more of their income has to be directed to housing. The price didn't even fall that much. One look at Temu and friends should disabuse you of the notion that we are actually getting things for "Cheap". Usually it just means product quality was drastically reduced thanks to millions spent on "value engineering", so that your new products don't last long enough to put you out of business. Sure is great that GE can now reliably predict the lifespan of parts in their washing machines so they never make the mistake of gasp overspeccing a component so it lasts a lifetime!
- digitaltrees 4mo ago
  That’s a bad example. Detroit isn’t an example of over building it’s an example of eroding the demand across the entire economy by outsourcing jobs. There is a big difference between a city with full employment with a robust consumer base that happens to have a ton of housing hit the market and one that has it’s entire bedrock industry carved into pieces over several generations. If you want a valid example look at Austin Texas or Japan. Housing inventory growth in a robust economy leads to….wait for it….rent decreases.
  - PeterStuer 4mo ago
    Austin sure has become so much more affordable ... Wait!
    - ashdksnndck 4mo ago
      The rent in Austin is 22% lower than it was 3 years ago.
      - pandaman 4mo ago
        And 25% higher than 6 years ago.
    - ceejayoz 4mo ago
      https://www.texastribune.org/2025/01/22/austin-texas-rents-falling/ https://www.texastribune.org/2025/01/22/austin-texas-rents-f... > Now, Austin is one of the only major U.S. cities where rents are falling. > Austin rents have tumbled for 19 straight months, data from Zillow show. The typical asking rent in the capital city sat at $1,645 as of December, according to Zillow — above where rents stood prior to the pandemic but below where they peaked amid the region’s red-hot growth. > The chief reason behind Austin’s falling rents, real estate experts and housing advocates said, is a massive apartment building boom unmatched by any other major city in Texas or in the rest of the country. Apartment builders in the Austin area kicked into overdrive during the pandemic, resulting in tens of thousands of new apartments hitting the market.
oatmeal1 4mo ago
America doesn't need new cities. There is an unbelievable amount of space wasted within every city and any urban planner can show you. Development policy in the 40s and 50s was backward and we continue to suffer the consequences today.
- CalRobert 4mo ago
  Absolutely, but it's easier to build quality mixed use development and walkable, bikable neighbourhoods when you don't have thousands of NIMBYs screaming down every proposal.
  - stahtops 4mo ago
    Pick your favorite place on the planet. Then tell me if 8 billion people can live there, and would it be the same place if they did? I know the answer to both of these questions, and so do you.
    - lmm 4mo ago
      I live in one of the most populous metropolitan areas on the planet because it's the best place to live in the world. Increasing density and population is working great so far; maybe it won't scale all the way to 8 billion, but as and when there's a problem we'll deal with it.
    - pjc50 4mo ago
      "This solution won't work in <ludicrously overextended case>, therefore let's do nothing!" -- common software engineering requirements management technique
    - deleted 4mo ago
      [deleted]
    - CalRobert 4mo ago
      ... I'm talking about building new cities, which seems like the exact opposite of what you're describing? Anyway, as far what happens when you make renting impossible (or just de facto not financially realistic), in Amsterdam it led to a lot of rentals being sold. The people buying had roughly 2x the income of those renting, on average. So, I guess that's a good thing, if your goal is to evict lower income renters so people can buy a place more cheaply. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t05cFv02pzY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t05cFv02pzY discusses this at length.
th0raway 4mo ago
America already has plenty of cities that aren't doing very well, and aren't getting migration, so new cities aren't going to help. There's plenty of cheap housing inventory in the US, just not in the places where the jobs are.
- AdrianB1 4mo ago
  I guess many jobs don't want to be in the places where very cheap housing exists. What is the point of earning SV money and live in a bad neighbourhood?
  - AnimalMuppet 4mo ago
    Depends on what you mean. Sidney, Nebraska, for example, doesn't really have "bad neighborhoods" in the NY or SF sense. But it's still a small town in Nebraska. Not a dying one, though. And you can get a non-trashed - by NY standards - 3 bedroom house for $120K. So, what do you actually want? Do you have to live in NY or SF, or can you live in flyover country? You can buy out there, if you're willing to live out there. If it were me, I'd consider taking 20% less Silicon Valley money for full remote (if I could get that), and live where I could buy something.
    - vladvasiliu 4mo ago
      > So, what do you actually want? This. Also, not everybody wants the same thing, so there's no single universal solution. I live in the big city because I enjoy going out dancing, having a drink at a bar with a bunch of acquaintances, coming home late at night, etc., all without having to sit in traffic or in transit for more than one hour each way. If I lived where my parents live (which I actually did for a few months at the beginning of the year, so I know), my social life would be dead. My sister, on the other hand, lives in a big-ass house with a larger yard than her dogs know what to do with, which cost less than my apartment. She doesn't care about going out, neither does her SO; they're full WFH, and the school bus picks up her kids from their front gate. Their setup works great for them.
maeln 4mo ago
> The solution is pretty simple: build and unreasonable amount of housing. And entirely new cities. So it is not simple. "Just build more" always comes up in those discussions, and while it does help (and has been proven to help), it is not the definite answer for the housing issues. Build a new city from the ground up with a bunch of cheap modern housing, walkable and all modern goodies and ... nobody will move. People don't move just because housing is cheap. Actually many people are willing to spend a significant amount of their income to live in specific places. We move to have a job, to build a career, to be close to friends and family, to have better access to entertainment and activities, ... This is why most developed country experience rural flight. The housing crisis is (mostly) a big city problem. You can usually find extremely cheap housing if you go deep in the countryside. And building is also cheaper (the price of the land is less, there is less permits issues, etc). And for big cities, "build more" is way more challenging. Ground space is limited, so one solution is to build more vertical, but it is costly and has its own limitation. Spreading may cause issue with water management and require big investment in a public transport infrastructure if you don't want to have a nightmare traffic. Pollution can be a very big issue, etc. And that's for all the non-political issues. The political side of things can get very messy, very quickly. If there was a simple solution, every big city in the world would have done it by now.
- mentalgear 4mo ago
  It would of course be a functioning state's responsibility to plan urban/city development and economic incentives to move there. Regarding the ownership vs renter housing debate: I think Singapore may be an excellent example of a state doing it's duty: affordable state-owned housing and people are distributed per housing per the national demographics so you also build social coherence vs ghetto-fication.
  - BerislavLopac 4mo ago
    Singapore is a special case, since it doesn't really have any rural areas.
  - deleted 4mo ago
    [deleted]
ponector 4mo ago
Detroit had tons of extra housing. Why have people people fled to other cities? There is no easy fast solution to this. Just build more housing will not solve complex issues. Not saying there should not be more construction, though.
- kdheiwns 4mo ago
  Some cities are desirable. Some are not. New York is a city that people all around the world want to live in. Detroit is the opposite.
  - AdrianB1 4mo ago
    > New York is a city that people all around the world want to live in I don't know anyone that wants to live in NY. I would not move there for a 7 figure salary. I think some opinions in this discussion are based on old realities from 50 years ago, no longer accurate.
    - CPLX 4mo ago
      There must just be 8 million of us that haven't figured out how to leave, huh?
    - postflopclarity 4mo ago
      NYC is certainly the best city in the US.
      - AdrianB1 4mo ago
        This is a very bold and subjective statement. I don't disagree it is the best city in US for some people, but the objective best - I doubt it.
        wk_end 4mo ago
        We shouldn't talk about "objective best" without pinning down what that means. I can only really imagine it in a sort of Aristotelian sense - a city could be the best city because it most fully embodies the notion of what it means to be city (as opposed to a more rural or suburban area): a usually cosmopolitan agglomeration of people where the density/economies of scale/competition create an environment that allows art, culture, entertainment, public services, etc. to flourish. In that particular sense I think NYC is the clear best city in the country, no competition, with maybe Chicago being a somewhat distant runner-up. In that mode of thinking it's arguably the best city in the world, actually. Now, that said: when I lived in the US I (mostly) preferred living in Seattle over NYC for the weather, natural beauty, and more laid-back vibe...subjectively Seattle was better for me, but I still don't have an issue with saying NYC is "objectively" a better city than Seattle.
cucumber3732842 4mo ago
I'm not sure how you get there without killing or violently subjugating tens of millions of people. Everything preventing what you want is backed by a law. On the other side of that law is someone making a buck either via business being driven straight to them or business being driven away from someone else and they will fight to preserve it. Even a simple amendment to the clean water act to exempt residential square footage would have every asshole who makes money off an engineering stamp up in arms. Even some guy who designs bridges would be pissed because he doesn't to compete with all the other labor that would put on the market. Wash rinse repeat for literally every other issue that's roadblocking the construction of housing. And this is assuming you want to just develop existing areas further (turn suburbs into cities, exurbs into suburbs, as happened from ~1870 through ~1970). Creating cities from scratch is way harder. Where are those people gonna work?
vjk800 4mo ago
World is full of empty houses. It's just that people want to live in New York and not in some other place where housing is cheap or, occasionally, even free. And New York is already pretty full.

epsteingpt 4mo ago

See Detroit mid-2010s for why massive overbuilding isn't a good strategy here.

knowaveragejoe 4mo ago
Can you explain more? What happened in Detroit in the mid 2010s, how did itreverse course after that?
- epsteingpt 4mo ago
  Detroit was the hub of the auto industry. Outsourcing and foreign competition hollowed out the central city (which deliberately didn't have public transit) and left gigantic abandoned houses and skyscrapers throughout. There has been massive public investment and popular support to cause a revival of sorts in the city and is a success story. Go look at some photos from like 2010-2014.
  - Retric 4mo ago
    Such short term issues from massive economic collapse suggests building more housing works.
  - digitaltrees 4mo ago
    This happened throughout North Carolina where I live when textiles and furniture manufacturing was off shored. I assure you it wasn’t over building that caused the same outcome. It’s almost like the is an alternate explanation that is the common thread. What could it be?
  - registeredcorn 4mo ago
    How was the work outsourced around that timeframe? Do they no longer have an auto-industry at all in Detroit, or is it just greatly reduced?
    - vel0city 4mo ago
      Detroit was pretty much the place where cars were designed and manufactured in the US at one point in time. The highest producing factories, the engineering, the management, most of it happened practically inside the city. Over time these auto manufacturers opened plants on lower cost of living places, spreading out across the Midwest while a lot of the engineering and management still took place in Detroit. People often point to foreign competition for the downfall of urban Detroit but the writing was on the wall and decay starting well before foreign imports made a big splash. Between 1945 and 1957, GM, Ford, and Chrysler built 25 brand-new auto plants in the Detroit metro area. Not a single one was built inside the city limits. They weren't building these factories overseas (yet), they were building them in cheaper parts of the US. Detroit lost hundreds of thousands of well-paying factory jobs well before Volkswagen and Toyota started selling things in real numbers in the 1960s.
    - digitaltrees 4mo ago
      The great lakes cities were the wealthiest most influential region for a period of time. Go watch movies from the 80s. Detroit was the industrial heart of America. There are lots of factors but broadly characterizing them as globalization is generally fair. Some included: The rise of japanese cars added competition but they were held at bay by import restrictions and the American preference for massive cars until the gas shortages in the 70s, the trend towards efficient capital meant most industrial firms switched to prioritizing their more profitable financing arms, Reagan liberalized international trade that let foreign imports into the US market, NAFTA moving manufacturing to mexico and canada, companies moving manufacturing to non union states in the south, then moving the parts supply chain abroad.
- CPLX 4mo ago
  It happened over a longer period obviously, and what happened is the US adopted a failed industrial policy that saw our core manufacturing base shipped to China for the benefit of Wall Street and the financial sector.
  - dgoldstein0 4mo ago
    Globalization wasn't a loss for all of America - the benefit of shipping manufacturing overseas was that the resulting imports were cheaper than producing domestically. After all if they weren't, people would've preferred to buy domestic. So it was a net win for the consumer via cheaper goods, but came at the expense of Detroit, Pittsburgh and other "rust belt" cities & communities. We're still grappling with the consequences. We should've invested in transitioning those workers to comparable or better jobs but the ball got completely dropped on that.
    - CPLX 4mo ago
      It wasn’t a net win for the consumer. The consumer is now much worse off than before and our country is weaker. It was just a mistake to allow ourselves to be ruled by the financial sector.
      - digitaltrees 4mo ago
        I thought that as well. But the benefits of cheaper goods when manufacturing is shift elsewhere comes at the cost if the future innovations that follow manufacturing. American businesses forget that happening to the British when we took over manufacturing for England. Now China and Mexico have innovations we lack because their engineering has access to the assembly lines and see where innovations need to happen.
    - mrguyorama 4mo ago
      If your purchasing power is cut in half because you lost your manufacturing job and had to replace it with running a cash register, but the cost of toys also dropped in half (but not things like food and housing, which doubled in price), are you actually better off? No. Average Americans are poorer now than they were before they could buy everything at Walmart. As long as housing continues to be a "Line must go up" investment, Americans will continue to become poorer as more and more of their income has to be directed to housing. The price didn't even fall that much. One look at Temu and friends should disabuse you of the notion that we are actually getting things for "Cheap". Usually it just means product quality was drastically reduced thanks to millions spent on "value engineering", so that your new products don't last long enough to put you out of business. Sure is great that GE can now reliably predict the lifespan of parts in their washing machines so they never make the mistake of gasp overspeccing a component so it lasts a lifetime!
digitaltrees 4mo ago
That’s a bad example. Detroit isn’t an example of over building it’s an example of eroding the demand across the entire economy by outsourcing jobs. There is a big difference between a city with full employment with a robust consumer base that happens to have a ton of housing hit the market and one that has it’s entire bedrock industry carved into pieces over several generations. If you want a valid example look at Austin Texas or Japan. Housing inventory growth in a robust economy leads to….wait for it….rent decreases.
- PeterStuer 4mo ago
  Austin sure has become so much more affordable ... Wait!
  - ashdksnndck 4mo ago
    The rent in Austin is 22% lower than it was 3 years ago.
    - pandaman 4mo ago
      And 25% higher than 6 years ago.
  - ceejayoz 4mo ago
    https://www.texastribune.org/2025/01/22/austin-texas-rents-falling/ https://www.texastribune.org/2025/01/22/austin-texas-rents-f... > Now, Austin is one of the only major U.S. cities where rents are falling. > Austin rents have tumbled for 19 straight months, data from Zillow show. The typical asking rent in the capital city sat at $1,645 as of December, according to Zillow — above where rents stood prior to the pandemic but below where they peaked amid the region’s red-hot growth. > The chief reason behind Austin’s falling rents, real estate experts and housing advocates said, is a massive apartment building boom unmatched by any other major city in Texas or in the rest of the country. Apartment builders in the Austin area kicked into overdrive during the pandemic, resulting in tens of thousands of new apartments hitting the market.

oatmeal1 4mo ago

America doesn't need new cities. There is an unbelievable amount of space wasted within every city and any urban planner can show you. Development policy in the 40s and 50s was backward and we continue to suffer the consequences today.

CalRobert 4mo ago
Absolutely, but it's easier to build quality mixed use development and walkable, bikable neighbourhoods when you don't have thousands of NIMBYs screaming down every proposal.
- stahtops 4mo ago
  Pick your favorite place on the planet. Then tell me if 8 billion people can live there, and would it be the same place if they did? I know the answer to both of these questions, and so do you.
  - lmm 4mo ago
    I live in one of the most populous metropolitan areas on the planet because it's the best place to live in the world. Increasing density and population is working great so far; maybe it won't scale all the way to 8 billion, but as and when there's a problem we'll deal with it.
  - pjc50 4mo ago
    "This solution won't work in <ludicrously overextended case>, therefore let's do nothing!" -- common software engineering requirements management technique
  - deleted 4mo ago
    [deleted]
  - CalRobert 4mo ago
    ... I'm talking about building new cities, which seems like the exact opposite of what you're describing? Anyway, as far what happens when you make renting impossible (or just de facto not financially realistic), in Amsterdam it led to a lot of rentals being sold. The people buying had roughly 2x the income of those renting, on average. So, I guess that's a good thing, if your goal is to evict lower income renters so people can buy a place more cheaply. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t05cFv02pzY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t05cFv02pzY discusses this at length.

th0raway 4mo ago

America already has plenty of cities that aren't doing very well, and aren't getting migration, so new cities aren't going to help. There's plenty of cheap housing inventory in the US, just not in the places where the jobs are.

AdrianB1 4mo ago
I guess many jobs don't want to be in the places where very cheap housing exists. What is the point of earning SV money and live in a bad neighbourhood?
- AnimalMuppet 4mo ago
  Depends on what you mean. Sidney, Nebraska, for example, doesn't really have "bad neighborhoods" in the NY or SF sense. But it's still a small town in Nebraska. Not a dying one, though. And you can get a non-trashed - by NY standards - 3 bedroom house for $120K. So, what do you actually want? Do you have to live in NY or SF, or can you live in flyover country? You can buy out there, if you're willing to live out there. If it were me, I'd consider taking 20% less Silicon Valley money for full remote (if I could get that), and live where I could buy something.
  - vladvasiliu 4mo ago
    > So, what do you actually want? This. Also, not everybody wants the same thing, so there's no single universal solution. I live in the big city because I enjoy going out dancing, having a drink at a bar with a bunch of acquaintances, coming home late at night, etc., all without having to sit in traffic or in transit for more than one hour each way. If I lived where my parents live (which I actually did for a few months at the beginning of the year, so I know), my social life would be dead. My sister, on the other hand, lives in a big-ass house with a larger yard than her dogs know what to do with, which cost less than my apartment. She doesn't care about going out, neither does her SO; they're full WFH, and the school bus picks up her kids from their front gate. Their setup works great for them.

maeln 4mo ago

> The solution is pretty simple: build and unreasonable amount of housing. And entirely new cities. So it is not simple. "Just build more" always comes up in those discussions, and while it does help (and has been proven to help), it is not the definite answer for the housing issues. Build a new city from the ground up with a bunch of cheap modern housing, walkable and all modern goodies and ... nobody will move. People don't move just because housing is cheap. Actually many people are willing to spend a significant amount of their income to live in specific places. We move to have a job, to build a career, to be close to friends and family, to have better access to entertainment and activities, ... This is why most developed country experience rural flight. The housing crisis is (mostly) a big city problem. You can usually find extremely cheap housing if you go deep in the countryside. And building is also cheaper (the price of the land is less, there is less permits issues, etc). And for big cities, "build more" is way more challenging. Ground space is limited, so one solution is to build more vertical, but it is costly and has its own limitation. Spreading may cause issue with water management and require big investment in a public transport infrastructure if you don't want to have a nightmare traffic. Pollution can be a very big issue, etc. And that's for all the non-political issues. The political side of things can get very messy, very quickly. If there was a simple solution, every big city in the world would have done it by now.

mentalgear 4mo ago
It would of course be a functioning state's responsibility to plan urban/city development and economic incentives to move there. Regarding the ownership vs renter housing debate: I think Singapore may be an excellent example of a state doing it's duty: affordable state-owned housing and people are distributed per housing per the national demographics so you also build social coherence vs ghetto-fication.
- BerislavLopac 4mo ago
  Singapore is a special case, since it doesn't really have any rural areas.
- deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]

ponector 4mo ago

Detroit had tons of extra housing. Why have people people fled to other cities? There is no easy fast solution to this. Just build more housing will not solve complex issues. Not saying there should not be more construction, though.

kdheiwns 4mo ago
Some cities are desirable. Some are not. New York is a city that people all around the world want to live in. Detroit is the opposite.
- AdrianB1 4mo ago
  > New York is a city that people all around the world want to live in I don't know anyone that wants to live in NY. I would not move there for a 7 figure salary. I think some opinions in this discussion are based on old realities from 50 years ago, no longer accurate.
  - CPLX 4mo ago
    There must just be 8 million of us that haven't figured out how to leave, huh?
  - postflopclarity 4mo ago
    NYC is certainly the best city in the US.
    - AdrianB1 4mo ago
      This is a very bold and subjective statement. I don't disagree it is the best city in US for some people, but the objective best - I doubt it.
      - wk_end 4mo ago
        We shouldn't talk about "objective best" without pinning down what that means. I can only really imagine it in a sort of Aristotelian sense - a city could be the best city because it most fully embodies the notion of what it means to be city (as opposed to a more rural or suburban area): a usually cosmopolitan agglomeration of people where the density/economies of scale/competition create an environment that allows art, culture, entertainment, public services, etc. to flourish. In that particular sense I think NYC is the clear best city in the country, no competition, with maybe Chicago being a somewhat distant runner-up. In that mode of thinking it's arguably the best city in the world, actually. Now, that said: when I lived in the US I (mostly) preferred living in Seattle over NYC for the weather, natural beauty, and more laid-back vibe...subjectively Seattle was better for me, but I still don't have an issue with saying NYC is "objectively" a better city than Seattle.

cucumber3732842 4mo ago

I'm not sure how you get there without killing or violently subjugating tens of millions of people. Everything preventing what you want is backed by a law. On the other side of that law is someone making a buck either via business being driven straight to them or business being driven away from someone else and they will fight to preserve it. Even a simple amendment to the clean water act to exempt residential square footage would have every asshole who makes money off an engineering stamp up in arms. Even some guy who designs bridges would be pissed because he doesn't to compete with all the other labor that would put on the market. Wash rinse repeat for literally every other issue that's roadblocking the construction of housing. And this is assuming you want to just develop existing areas further (turn suburbs into cities, exurbs into suburbs, as happened from ~1870 through ~1970). Creating cities from scratch is way harder. Where are those people gonna work?

vjk800 4mo ago

World is full of empty houses. It's just that people want to live in New York and not in some other place where housing is cheap or, occasionally, even free. And New York is already pretty full.