Comment by rurp
3 hours ago
It's all talking points on both sides. "Build more housing" being the one true solution has become a religious tenant in a lot of wonkish circles. I see it repeated uncritically every single time this topic comes up on HN and similar spaces.
The reality is that demand is always going to far outstrip supply in certain areas. You can only cram so many houses into a place like San Franciso, even if you raze the city to the ground and replace it with some yimby paradise that houses 25% more people. The extra supply might lower costs to some degree in the short term but the induced demand will ensure they stay above what someone on an average salary can afford. Everyone seems to understand this when the topic is freeway expansion, but not with housing.
The actual solution for housing costs is a lot more complicated and multi-pronged, but that doesn't fit neatly on a bumper sticker. There actually is a ton of affordable housing in the US, but it's mostly in areas that people in influential industries like tech and media tend to sneer at, so it gets dismissed; and suggesting someone move there is practically treated as a human rights abuse.
Dramatically increasing housing density does have adverse affects for existing residents. It's fine to say the tradeoffs are worth it, I'm not saying it's never the answer, but even acknowledging that it's a tradeoff usually gets met with dismissive insults from the yimby crowd.
It might be unsatisfyingly simplistic, but if prices are high in an area because a lot of people want to live there, building more housing seems like a fundamentally better approach than demanding everyone who wants to live in San Francisco instead accept living in Mississippi. Even if prices stabilize back to where they were before, it would still be a net win that more people than before get to live in a desirable place for the same cost. I'm genuinely not "sneering" at Mississippi here. But if you want to live in San Francisco, Mississippi is probably not going to be a reasonable substitute and maybe making it easier for you to live in San Francisco is a reasonable policy goal.
But history and lots of examples suggests prices are unlikely to remain the same if you build more supply, which makes sense from an economics perspective. There aren't an unlimited number of people wanting to live in a particular area at a given price point, otherwise they would likely have driven the price higher in the first place. Induced demand is a problem for highways because the cost of driving that particular route at a particular time is essentially zero, which his not really true of moving to a different area.
Isn't SF infamously a SFH zone that makes no sense? If you razed the whole city and rebuilt it like Manhattan, you wouldn't have 25% more inhabitants, you'd have 25000% more. And if you improve public transit (I heard BART is some that's pretty good by American standards but not by European standards?) you can drastically widen the area that feels like the core city (just take a look at Berlin which I'm familiar with) giving maybe another 1000% multiplicative increase.
Every time I'm in Berlin I love the public transit system there. I think that's because they have a relatively dense network of lines through the city center, and the trains run every 4-5 minutes which means you don't have to check the timetable before going to the station, you can just show up. I haven't visited London or NYC though. I know some cities with more modern train signaling have trains every 1-2 minutes so there is basically always a train at every metro station.