Comment by davidw
6 days ago
This argument always comes up when discussing a specific place.
"Everyone would move to ________ because it is the best place in the spiral arm of the Milky Way", where ________ is Boulder, Bend, Austin, Portland, San Francisco, Santa Barbara, Hawai'i, Santa Fe, etc.... etc....
It cannot be true for all of them. So they all need to build and people will figure out where they actually want to live.
Bozeman, Montana, a small city of 50K people, is seeing falling rents because they built a lot of housing:
https://montanafreepress.org/2025/06/23/has-bozemans-rental-...
And it's very much the kind of small place where "everyone wants to live there".
If everyone could live where they wanted to live, then ya, why wouldn't everyone want to live in the best cities?
If you have fixed demand, then you can definitely "build" your way out of a housing crisis. Bozeman, for example, doesn't have many jobs, so you can't really live there if you don't bring your own money. A big city like Seattle or Denver... they have lots of jobs, so they will grow at least to the point that all those jobs have people working them...but then a city like that attracts even more jobs (the way cities work since they concentrate talent, which attracts more businesses looking for that talent), more people, it could grow from a million people to 10 or 20 million easily.
> And it's very much the kind of small place where "everyone wants to live there".
MT is a bad place if you need to work for a living: high housing prices, jobs don't pay very well if you can find them at all. My mom moved to Helena in the late 90s and found that out first hand. If WFH took off as expected, then you definitely could make a good life in Bozeman or Missoula or Butte, but alas, the opposite happened and we regressed greatly.
The population of Bozeman is still growing, albeit more slowly. It's not like people left. They just built a lot of housing, vacancy rates increased and prices dropped.
Same thing happened in Austin, Texas, which is a much bigger city with lots of jobs.
The underlying story is that building enough housing is a good way to fix a shortage of housing, which is what causes high prices.
> If everyone could live where they wanted to live, then ya, why wouldn't everyone want to live in the best cities?
Best is different for different people. Some people it means close to beaches, for other it means cultural institutions, for others it means lots of tech companies, for others it means wide open spaces.
Land is eventually limited, but there is tons of variety available of what people like.
> If everyone could live where they wanted to live, then ya, why wouldn't everyone want to live in the best cities?
I moved from midtown Manhattan to western Wyoming. People have diverse preferences. (Even if we assume uniform preferences, densifying the population into a few cities so we can reclaim our wildlands sounds like a dream.)
> I moved from midtown Manhattan to western Wyoming.
If I could afford to live in Jackson, I would love to someday. But alas, Jackson real estate makes Seattle look cheap.
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Even if you can observe this induced demand locally in a city or two, the net supply is going up.
Globally, demand isn't even fixed. It's proportional to the population size, which we would expect to shrink.
The only way this could work in the opposite direction is that you build enough that it becomes feasible for everyone to live in a few supercities where demand keeps growing due to network effects, and the supply outside of the supercities is useless.
Housing stock definitely goes up in those cities that have the demand. Other cities drain out as a consequence and housing is razed in the cities that are no longer popular, like Buffalo and Detroit.
Do we really want that? Of course, housing has to be maintained and has a lifespan (the Japanese are good at rebuilding housing stock after 20-30 years), and so it can simply die off in the places that are no longer popular, but it seems like a waste of infrastructure investments that then have to be re-done in the new hot places.