Comment by ImPostingOnHN
3 days ago
> Try to find a city where dense housing made it cheaper.
Are there cities where replacing denser housing with single-family homes made housing cheaper?
3 days ago
> Try to find a city where dense housing made it cheaper.
Are there cities where replacing denser housing with single-family homes made housing cheaper?
Not quite. But there ARE examples where the price growth was stopped by providing alternative options to the cycle of ever-densification.
A really good example is Copenhagen, the world's most liveable city. Its current population is still _less_ than during the 1970's peak: https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/cities/20894/cope... The driver for the decrease was suburban migration, as cars became more accessible.
The US _itself_ is a great example. The suburban development created cheap housing for the rapidly growing population in 60-s.
Do you have more details on this 1 example, specifically the trends of city housing prices and demand? A quick search [0] seems to show city housing prices increasing, rather than decreasing.
Obviously housing built outside the city will be cheaper than within it, and that might work for people who are fine living just anywhere (like away from the city), but the hypothesis is that the prices within the city increase when more housing (denser housing) is added within the city, right?
It's just hard to imagine how replacing a 300-unit occupied building downtown with 4-8 single-family-homes would result in the SFHs being cheaper than a unit in the skyscraper was.
0: https://www.courthousenews.com/copenhagen-housing-prices-dou...
> Do you have more details on this 1 example, specifically the trends of city housing prices and demand?
I don't have all the information on Copenhagen yet. The stats from 1970-s are not available online, so I commissioned someone to get the data from the archives.
The available data basically shows that prices were stagnant during the 70-80-s and started rising in the 90-s.
> After all, building more housing in the city isn't mutually exclusive with building housing outside the city.
I think it is mutually exclusive, exactly because of the population growth (the lack thereof). Each dense apartment in a city core means one less house in a rural area somewhere.
Japan, that I gave as an example, has literally free houses that anyone can get for nothing but the government real estate transaction fees. Just 3-4 hours away from Tokyo.
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