> A developer could likely fit 3-4 nice cottage homes on that lot, sell them for $500-700k, and make a profit
Denver takes 264 days to approve "multi-family or industrial projects with a valuation in excess of $1.5 million, such as a new apartment or office building, large additions" [1]. Construction loans in Colorado cost "8% to 13%" [2]. For a project with $1.5mm up-front costs, from land purchases to permit fees and legal costs, that comes to $87 to 141 thousand per project.
This isn't as bad as San Francisco, where permiting delays alone add hundreds of thousands of dollars to housing costs. But in addition to upzoning, it's something to be considered, particularly since Denver seems to categorise practically all impactful residential development as "major commercial."
>particularly since Denver seems to categorise practically all impactful residential development as "major commercial."
This isn't an accident. They know what they're doing.
Every municipality tries to do this to the extent they think they can get away with it because it's an end run around your property right. There's all sorts of residential exemptions and precedents and case law and courts and politicians tend not to be in a hurry to screw homeowners because there's tons of them.
By classifying you as commercial it gives them a) all sorts of capricious authority to micromanage the pettiest of details and/or force you to expend money with no recourse except "haha, sue us peasant".
It's absolutely vital to homeowners that no new housing be built, to keep Undesirables from moving in, but they need to do it in a way which leaves no blood on their hands so they can continue to have their In This House signs with no cognitive dissonance.
And this is how they get it: don't make it literally illegal to build housing, but make it economically impossible in practice. Then they can go "welp, nothing's getting built, I guess there's nothing we could've done", and as an added bonus they also get to say "looks like the free market can never fix our housing shortage!"
This is why we must overturn zoning - governments should not have the right to tell you how much you can build. Then we have a shot of forcing permitting to be faster. Make the delay a taking!
Wait, so they are simultaneously purposely not doing anything to help housing, but they are doing it as an evil scheme to let them bypass the free market and... help housing?
This is happening in large parts of the EU as well. It's pretty mind blowing. Since the mid 2010s, the new build construction rate has slowed down to alarmingly low levels. A few years before that, there was an oversupply, yet they kept building. It's totally intentional.
Unsurprisingly, affordability is so bad. In lots of major cities, a one-bed rental takes around 50% of a mid-career post-tax salary. You have become an indentured servant for whatever real estate fund owns your property. Lots of regulatory capture behind the scenes.
Ironically, some parts of the UK, including Home Counties, are now much better than most EU, including Scandinavia, with lots of shared ownership and affordable housing schemes. It's really easy. Increasing the supply of homes, in particular first homes, and preventing predatory tactics to constrain supply.
> Today, the neighborhood is mixed-income with a range of families from different backgrounds
This is a good thing!
Overall I think this is simply an outcome of NIMBYism, regulators over regulating to justify their existence, and a K shaped economy.
There's nothing wrong with the market building what there is actual money in. No one should be forced to lose money to serve those who cannot afford the product. (That's the space of charities)
Denver seems to have done an amazing job, relative to other places I've been, at actually adding a lot more housing. The market likely would be _worse_ had there not been so much built (and building)
No, we can't. Once could lower the rate of increase of housing prices (and, more realistically, land values), but "gentrification" isn't really just about pricing, but a change in preferences: Areas close to urban centers had low prices because people wanted to live in deep suburbs, far away from city crime and bad schools. Now they are desirable, and thus people far more affluent are going to bit outbidding the communities that live there anyway. So the gentrification is inevitable, and IMO any attempts to stop it are bad: Nobody has right to a character of the neighborhood, whether we are talking a Mexican American community or people that want racial covenants in their subdivision. The entire idea is just straight out illiberal in the broadest of senses.
It's true that the gentrification process speeds up when there is no building, as those differences in preferences mean existing tenants are competing with even richer people, and would have to move even further out, but the change in preferences still exists, and thus the gentrification is straight out unavoidable.
Besides, in almost every place where we have serious housing problems, the small changes proposed here are insufficient. When the land is expensive, the normal behavior everywhere is to redevelop plots to the maximum economically viable density. Turning 1 house into 4, which would sell for 500k each, doesn't make sense when the possibility of an apartment building is there. Single stairway apartments turn those 4 cottage homes into 16 3-4 bedroom units. If one is simplifying permitting anyway, why not simplify it for that density, and get far more out of the same land. Those 4 new cottages, now new, would not get redeveloped again for another 30, 40 years, so they would become difficult to afford really quickly. That's why you don't see many places actually attempting this low key densification, as it's way too much work for what you get.
the city of vienna mandates that 2/3rd of any new housing is subsidized. so instead of controlling the price all over, you control the price of a part, and make sure that every neighborhood has room for low income families. in other words you enforce mixing. singapore is another city with a lot of subsidized housing.
And both have become massively unaffordable as a result, and have long lines to wait for housing. Vienna can't grow anymore as a result. The Christmas markets are still nice, but the city is frozen in amber.
Controls on housing prices make it easy to claim "look we made it cheaper" at the cost of forcing people to move away.
that's every large city in germany too. except in vienna it only affects 1/3rd of the population because everyone else lives in affordable subsidized housing. exactly who has been forced to move away?
Vienna can't grow anymore as a result.
huh? vienna has been growing from 1.5 million to 2 million in the last 3 decades. and it hasn't even reached the peak population it had a century ago. it is also building whole new neighborhoods. i don't know how you get the idea that it can't grow anymore. nothing could be further from the truth. there is plenty of space for new development in the east for example.
it's not a lottery. it's based on need. if your income is high enough that you don't qualify then most likely you can afford regular housing. sure here are always edge cases, and some people slip through the gaps, and you also already have to be living in the city for a few years (the rule is now two years, it used to be longer), so it's not available to everyone, but if you are already a resident then it's unlikely that you'll have to leave.
i might understand that if you showed me the actual criticism and evidence that substantiated it.
the system in vienna may not be perfect, but it does better than any other large city in austria and germany and maybe even in europe. criticizing is easy, but i don't think it's fair when the situation everywhere else is worse.
You haven't asked a single question. It's always a waste to engage when people start with "you're wrong". If you engage differently next time I would try!
i am sorry it comes across that way. it's kind of difficult to use a different approach when you make claims that i believe to be without any basis. my believe could be wrong of course, but as i am from vienna i do pay attention to what happens there to an extent, and in particular i compare it to other german cities, so i believe myself to be informed about this matter.
your first claim: vienna has become unaffordable because of its subsidized housing.
that claim in itself makes no sense because subsidies are what makes housing affordable. if your argument is that it caused the prices of the private market to go up, then that is false too because munich and berlin have average rents that are even higher, and other german cities are on par. vienna private rent prices are not out of the ordinary for a city that size. in other words subsidizing housing can't have had any worse effect on the private rental market than whatever those cities in germany do.
your second claim: Vienna can't grow anymore as a result.
vienna is building almost 10k homes every year and has been doing so for the last decade or more. that may not be enough, but that's certainly not for lack of space. there is still plenty of space for the city to grow, especially in the east part of the city where farmland is within the city borders.
i am countering your claims. what do you expect me to ask here? do you have any evidence for your claims?
you say you wished that i understood that there were real criticisms.
well, what are these criticisms? again, compared to other large german cities which are mostly worse i find it hard to believe that there is any valid criticism against vienna's approach. but let's hear it, i am willing to accept that i am wrong because i may have missed something. so what am i missing?
I live in the Denver metro and have worked on zoning code in other municipalities. This is actually the first I've heard about the "Unlocking Home Choices" plan. This proposal seems like an improvement overall. Some of my thoughts:
> The second concept is to incentivize retention of existing buildings by allowing substantial new construction behind them. Basically, let people cash in on their backyard. This is a significant expansion of the accessory unit rules we have today, and the city’s concept art suggests that it would allow backyard cottages larger than the existing homes (a big change).
This is interesting and I wonder how it would change neighborhood dynamics. I'm not opposed at all because it enables more potential housing options. We have a few of these in the neighborhoods I frequent, but from what I've heard, it's somewhat cost prohibitive in the current form to be worth building one. If this helps make ADUs (maybe the ADU would become the original structure in this case), then that seems like progress.
> The third concept is to allow more units if one unit is deed-restricted to be permanently “affordable.” This is basically the same logic as the first proposal — let developers sell more square footage if they do something residents want: in this case, deed-restrict part of the square footage to be priced below market rate.
This would be helpful for allowing current residents with lower incomes than the newcomers to stay in the neighborhood without taking away an existing dwelling unit from the market. Deed-restrictions kind of concern me, but this seems like a decent compromise to prevent displacement.
> What I don’t see in any of the proposals so far is streamlining and expediting permitting for developers who pursue the path the city wants: more, less expensive homes, rather than fewer, more expensive homes.
Indirectly, the removal of parking minimums from the zoning code should help with this. I think there was also a change to allow single stairways in the zoning which creates a bit more incentive for developers and potentially eases the permit process.
"ideally, a property owner should be able to walk into city hall and leave with a permit the same day if they’re building the kind of housing that the city explicitly wants to see built."
Hear, hear! Finally someone gets it. Same day permits for all high density housing projects.
BTW, the NIMBYs are definitely going to fight the cottage homes tooth and nail otherwise. "Where will all the new cars go???"
Zoning is likely a big part of what causes people to become medium wealthy. Making it legal to build on every parcel also helps avoid concentrating wealth.
Los Angeles, whose population is only 50% higher than Houston, has 25x as many people who are homeless (75k vs 3k).
If people couldn't afford food because there wasn't enough food grown, no one would think handing out food stamps would work. It's silly to think that doesn't work for housing.
These may be accurate and real, but I also wonder if this might partially be because Houston sucks in terms of lived experience for the homeless so they tend to end up elsewhere?
Texas has a recent and storied history of just busing people out of state or into other cities for people it deems are problematic or they don't want to deal with. So it would not surprise me if some of the stats are cooked or they've partially swept the problem under the rug.
I gave actual stats. They also match my impressions driving around both cities. If you have stats about the scale of busing people out of state please do share.
What you've suggested may account for some of the difference. But "Houston has liberal zoning and builds more houses" is a far simpler explanation for the staggering 25x difference in homeless population between the cities.
I hate this thing where we can't do a thing that helps a ton of people, because it also helps people we hate.
It's so poisonous to politics, and everyone does it for their pet peeve.
Can't do permitting reform, can't fix education, can't loosen bad regulation, all of it because someone you don't like might benefit and fuck that guy.
Infill development is synonymous with gentrification to most people.
Some cheap side of town where a new apartment complex is built on a parking lot of a half-dead strip mall? If it’s “new” it’s going to cost new. Local neighborhood residents won’t be able to afford commercial rent for a mom & pop restaurant compared to bougie-looking expensive shops. That’s gentrification, practically caused by infill development.
I agree that development is crucial, and agree with a lot of your comment. The fact of the matter is that new developments are by definition more expensive to rent out, so any kind of development in a rundown neighborhood will have a tendency to increase prices & drive out residents. There’s no easy way around that fact without government intervention.
The best we can hope for is maxing our development in dense spaces to the point that it won’t need to undergo another such drastic change any time soon, and having government programs to help the people impacted.
>Remove Red Tape (Environmental impact assessments
I absolutely understand what prompts this desperation, but much like the desperation that prompted the election of Trump, it's very, very much more bad than it is good.
What's the problem with removing zoning? Which I interpreted, charitably, as "remove low-density zoning" and not as "let anyone build a lead smelter in their yard". (Also, a suburban area is probably not a lead smelting operation's preferred location anyway).
Environmental impact assessments are great if they actually do what they say. But they can also be weaponized to block any new development in existing cities. Forcing suburban sprawl into less populated areas is a worse outcome if you want to protect the environment.
It's not clear that there's any bad in practice. All the fears I've seen about eliminating zoning turn out to be misunderstandings of either law or economics.
Jane Jacobs had a chapter about fixing this in 1961, and she's 10x more right now than she was then.
Well, I've witnessed this on dozens of houses in the town where my ex-wife grew up. The local river was slow-moving in a shallow river valley. Every spring, it would flood, and houses built within a half-mile of the main river would flood up to the second floor.
Would the environmental assessment help? I'd like to think so, but when I almost bought in the area, I discovered that the floodplain maps were "optimistic."
That's not what an environmental impact assessment is. Environmental impact assessments look at potential harms to the environment, not the property. It would look at if building a house would impact the wildlife, and sometimes other related phenomenon
Nope. I will f-ing yeet that baby along with the bathwater.
Every idiot (they're not even useful anymore FFS, look at the results) says this based on abstract assessments of individual rules and laws. But in practice the overall effect of the system is that all those environmental assessments and stormwater permits and all the other things aren't even speed bumps for big business interests with lawyers and engineers on staff. Those interests can construe any evil as compliant and do so at cost. The rules are unscalable cliffs to "normal" people and businesses who can't justify paying mid four to low five figures up front for projects that might not even generate that much value.
There are millions of homes that are super cheap and no one wants to live there. I think we missed a real opportunity for WFH to allow people to move where things are more affordable, rather than having everyone live in mega cities and complain of high prices.
I suspect that book was written with an extremely optimistic view of urban spaces. My experience in urban spaces has been depressing, isolating, cement, and asphalt. You can't do anything without somebody sticking their hand out asking for money.
I'm glad I'm living on my 10,000 ft² lot with multiple fruit trees, multiple vegetable gardens, berry gardens, bird-friendly bushes, and neighbors who are a good distance away from me. The only thing I would change is to reduce the light pollution so you can see six-magnitude stars from the backyard.
Now, if somebody wants to buy the property and convert it to a dense housing space, after I'm dead, great, I won't be in a position to care. But right now, I very much care about getting rid of lawns, building bird-friendly habitats, and growing plants you can eat.
For the most part, remote work ended up with people moving to already desirable remote communities, and exporting the housing crisis there without solving anything for the expensive metro areas.
The poor should get to share in the benefits of the improving community too, instead of having to move out, probably further from work, friends, etc. There are ways to control for this, of course, so it doesn't have to be so. Honestly, the poor get screwed over systemically in so many ways, I wonder where this ranks in relation to the others.
Huge fan of zoning reform, however I'd love to see equal effort in lending reform. The availability of multi-million dollar mortgages on 30 year terms means that we all get poorer. Getting people into owned homes is a dream left over from the Clinton era that has warped into an ever expanding pool of debt and over sized buildings. Developers will build to the limit of what people can afford (and slightly beyond), and that is defined by mortgage policy. The harsh reality is that as long as you're supporting a system where a 1k sqft house can cost 300, 400, 500k you're not helping anyone who isn't in the business of lending. The only way to reverse the trend is to limit the pool of available capital and bring the sale value of property down.
Can't happen without causing a lot of pain. In large part due to the debt. Holding prices flat in nominal terms is the best-case outcome; holding them flat in real terms the most likely one. Either, however, beats real appreciation.
(For what it's worth, I'm a homeowner with a jumbo mortgage.)
I am only aware of this because we actually ran into the problem. We started allowing more subdivisions and densification in our city and the waste water infrastructure got quickly pushed to its limits now we have to halt construction while the new water infrastructure is upgraded to accommodate for the massively increased zoning density.
That's interesting - naively I would expect the wastewater infrastructure to be overbuilt enough to manage larger than normal rains, which are usually several times over typical household wastewater production.
> naively I would expect the wastewater infrastructure to be overbuilt enough to manage larger than normal rains, which are usually several times over typical household wastewater production
It depends on the city—some cities do indeed handle rainwater with the normal sewer system, but most have an entirely separate system for rainwater [0]. But either way, if you pave more roads, you're always going to have more rainwater to deal with, regardless of which system of pipes you use.
1. The parent was mentioning densification - that doesn't automatically mean more roads.
2. It's not just roads but also roofs etc., is it common to drain the house roof into a different system than the rest of the house? Of course in a house with a large lot you can drain into a garden or whatever but that's not possible in densely built areas. In our city it all ends up in one system but of course we've had a sewer system since the middle ages or so.
> 1. The parent was mentioning densification - that doesn't automatically mean more roads.
Yes of course, I forgot where I was in the thread, sorry.
> 2. It's not just roads but also roofs etc., is it common to drain the house roof into a different system than the rest of the house? Of course in a house with a large lot you can drain into a garden or whatever but that's not possible in densely built areas. In our city it all ends up in one system but of course we've had a sewer system since the middle ages or so.
I'm mainly familiar with smaller buildings, but I know that it's illegal to drain rainwater into the main sewer system, so presumably the bigger buildings are hooked up to the storm sewer system.
The climate here is kinda bizzare though: it's fairly common to get a few days of +15°C while there's still 3' of snow on the ground, and as you can imagine, that causes a ton of runoff from all the melting. And very little here is more than a century old, so everything is comparatively modern.
The only way to "fix" prices is to increase supply, which the plan does really well otherwise!
This was the subject of extensive proof in a recent HN thread, where shockingly... the only thing that moved the needle was... shockingly... increasing supply. No matter of "well yeah, but we can do it differently this time" will fix it. You can only increase supply. Its the only lever you have.
Very curious about what tools or platforms are used to make the visual housing figures with highlighting like you see in strategy 2 figure. any tips much appreciated
A rare anti-Betteridge's law of headlines article.
Yes, there are laws that, if passed, would stop or slow or even reverse the increasing price of real estate. Would they pass? Hard to say and probably not quickly.
As has been repeated many times: it's in the financial interest of people who own property to increase their property's value by constraining supply via zoning/building codes, and they usually have a good amount of influence in the local politics that determine these rules.
The solve is fairly straightforward: allow absolute maximum density so long as it is built safely.
You'll get tall apartment buildings pretty quick. Then everyone can go to the schools and enjoy the low crime and fast fire response.
But that isn't allowed because incumbents don't want it.
There's not much new about this... it's the same story all over the US.
My neighborhood in California added plenty of these and it didn’t change the vibe of the neighborhood at all. It’s a great YIMBY solution because it satisfies both the pro and anti development crowds.
That's because WE DO NOT HAVE a housing crisis. And yes, I'm not crazy.
We have 1.1 housing units per family right _now_. We likely will have the record number of housing units per capita within about 2 years just due to the current pipeline of new housing. These numbers are easy to verify.
Why are we talking about housing then? That's because we have a JOBS crisis. The only available good jobs are concentrated in a dwindling number of dense areas. And making it easier to build makes the jobs crisis even worse.
Don't believe me? Look at Vancouver, BC. They did everything: automated transit, soul-crushingly depressive high rises near transit stations, (de-fact) prohibited foreign ownership of housing, streamlined permitting.
Guess what happened? If your guess is "plentiful cheap housing" then make another guess.
It's a bit misleading because the Y axis is not starting at 0.
> Regardless, I don't understand what your proposed solution to this supposed "jobs crisis" is.
Tax the dense office space, or do cap&trade. Incentivize remote work. Treat commute time as work time. Prohibit dense housing except in special cases (university campuses, military bases, senior living, etc.). Promote and subsidize self-driving cars.
It creates for companies more incentives to move to these areas, as they have easier access to a larger talent pool. Which in turn makes housing there even more expensive.
This is not "economy of scale", this is more of a "pollution death spiral" and "unpriced externalities".
A factory that dumps raw waste into rivers is more efficient and can produce widgets more cheaply than a factory that takes care to clean up the waste.
A firm in a dense city core can get talent more easily, and it'll have advantage (on average, in the long run) over a firm that has a fully remote workforce. The negative externalities (living in poor conditions in an expensive city) are offloaded onto the workers. E.g. the housing square footage keeps decreasing: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/charted-the-growing-gap-bet...
Also, firm in a dense city can get better talent, but those negative externalities (and I would argue these externalities are not clearly caused by the mployer) are made up for through increased salaries the firm must pay compared to areas with lower living costs.
Care to explain the cherry-picking? The average square footage was growing steadily (except for the 2008 crisis) and the inflection point happened around 2012 when the death spiral started in earnest.
It has been on the downward trend since then.
> Also, firm in a dense city can get better talent, but those negative externalities (and I would argue these externalities are not clearly caused by the mployer) are made up for through increased salaries the firm must pay compared to areas with lower living costs.
Except that the increased salary does NOT compensate for the increased cost of living. And firms absolutely don't pay for their impact on infrastructure.
My favorite example: Seattle. Each household will end up paying around $150k in additional taxes for the new transit that will benefit primarily dense office holders in the downtown.
> Care to explain the cherry-picking? The average square footage was growing steadily (except for the 2008 crisis) and the inflection point happened around 2012 when the death spiral started in earnest.
It is clearly cherry picked because the graph begins in 2015, which (as you can see in the one I linked) is the exact peak of the new build house sizes. A more honest article would show a larger date range.
Additionally, I feel it makes sense that new builds are getting smaller. People are generally having fewer children these days, so there shouldn't be as much need for huge houses.
> Except that the increased salary does NOT compensate for the increased cost of living. And firms absolutely don't pay for their impact on infrastructure.
It may not entirely make up for the cost of living, but in most cases I would say it certainly makes a big dent. And the rest of the difference can just be explained by the fact that people want to live in cities. So shouldn't it make sense that the cost of living is higher in these areas given that there is more demand for them?
> My favorite example: Seattle. Each household will end up paying around $150k in additional taxes for the new transit that will benefit primarily dense office holders in the downtown.
I think it's strange to frame public transit as primarily benefiting dense office-holders. There are tons of other entities in cities besides just companies in offices. It's a public good, and transit generally benefits everyone. Citizens, companies, government, educational institutions, etc.
Also please link to where I can read more about the $150k number.
> It is clearly cherry picked because the graph begins in 2015, which (as you can see in the one I linked) is the exact peak of the new build house sizes.
I mean... That was exactly the point.
> A more honest article would show a larger date range.
Sure. It provides an even better illustration about how the runaway urbanism resulted in breaking the previous trend of increasing living area.
> Additionally, I feel it makes sense that new builds are getting smaller. People are generally having fewer children these days, so there shouldn't be as much need for huge houses.
You might have cause and effect confused here.
> I think it's strange to frame public transit as primarily benefiting dense office-holders.
Why is it strange? In the counter-factual world without the dense office core, the new transit would have been useless.
> There are tons of other entities in cities besides just companies in offices.
And none of them requires the amount of traffic that justifies $150k per household.
> Also please link to where I can read more about the $150k number.
> Sure. It provides an even better illustration about how the runaway urbanism resulted in breaking the previous trend of increasing living area.
I don't follow the logic here. Why would 2015 be the tipping point? What's so special about that year? The US has been increasingly urbanizing since WW2.
Just to be clear, you're suggesting that people are having fewer kids (fertility had a recent peak in 2007) because new builds (which are just a small percentage of total housing stock!) have lost a few square feet? I find that to be laughable.
> Why is it strange? In the counter-factual world without the dense office core, the new transit would have been useless.
1. There are more than just offices in CBDs. There are also retail, restaurants, entertainment venues, residential, etc.
2. This ignores the benefit to the worker. And employer/employee relationship goes two-ways. You assign all the benefits to the employers (who gain access to a larger talent pool), while ignoring the fact that this benefits workers too by increasing the pool of jobs they can reliably and comfortably commute to.
3. Economic gains for employers are not purely extractive. A thriving and dynamic centeral business district helps provide income for residents, drive increased investment, and foster innovation.
> And none of them requires the amount of traffic that justifies $150k per household.
Sports venues. Concerts. Festivals. Parades. Any large gathering of people. Not to mention that it's still a good thing to have for general use to go anywhere, even at non-max-capacity times.
Not seeing that $150k per household number anywhere in that article. Looks like $10k per person is the number they come up with. Expensive to be sure, but not quite the number you somehow arrived at.
> negative externalities (living in poor conditions in an expensive city) are offloaded onto the workers
Cities are more efficient in practically every way than subsidized rural developments. It’s really weird to flip that around as an externality. (Disclaimer: I moved from New York to Wyoming. Thanks for your subsidies, I guess.)
There absolutely are jobs in remote places. But the people there aren’t as valuable as someone who will bump into like-minded colleagues and cultural expression as part of their existence in a cluster.
> Cities are more efficient in practically every way than subsidized rural developments
No, they're not. It's the other way around, in fact. Suburbs subsidize cities (on average, again).
The dense city cores produce most of the _corporate_ income tax, because that's where the companies are headquartered. But most of _personal_ income tax comes from suburbs. This is only now getting close to flipping around.
Cities also have YUUUUGE expenses that simply don't happen in sparse areas. E.g. infrastructure like water or sewer is wildly expensive in cities because of the planning overhead. Case in point: San Francisco spent almost half a billion rebuilding a few blocks of road.
Cities also require EXPENSIVE public transit. One ride on a bus/subway in the US costs around $20. I'm talking about the true cost (number of trips / total expenses), not the farebox cost. And with capex it's almost incalculable, with crazy numbers like $50 per ride for Seattle.
The TLDR; version:
1. Infrastructure in suburbs might end up being a bit more expensive on a per-capita basis. Or it might not, depending on the way you do accounting.
2. In any case, this difference is not at all significant.
3. Suburbs are _not_ subsidized, and in fact generate most of the wealth in the US.
If you have a refutation of Triumph of the City, it will be groundbreaking. Until it’s published, throwing in like one credible source would make your comments more serious.
I read "Triumph of the City" about 15 years ago. It's a well-researched book, and it literally makes the same points as I do. In particular, it describes the density death spiral much better than I can. It's a bit outdated regarding the carbon footprint because it was written before the EVs and self-driving but that's a fairly minor point.
Its biggest problem is that it was written before the negatives of the density death spiral became apparent.
The cities in the early 2000-s were the main benefactors of the global crime collapse. So suddenly, Times Square in NYC transformed from a blighted area into the world's most valuable real estate. How could you be negative about urbanism seeing that? Housing in cities was also relatively cheap because cities used to be less desirable than suburbs.
If I were to summarize, "Triumph of the City" is factually correct. Just as the statement: "coal power plants are a triumph of engineering, providing cheap, reliable, and accessible power".
Edit: another important thing that he's missing is the end of the population growth. So now it's a nearly zero-sum game: a new housing unit in Manhattan means one more dilapidated house in rural Ohio.
The premise is that the author is a libertarian, except that housing in the neighborhood they live in should be fixed at the price that they can afford, and that the character of the neighborhood from the point that they moved into it should be preserved.
It's only real gentrification when upper-middle class YIMBYs get forced out.
This may be a non-sequitur to your point—and what I'm reading as a put-down makes me less likely to read the fine article that I indeed have not (to the credit of the potency of the point that I hope I'm grasping).
Between AI and whatever housing problems are being felt by co-founders and advisors and chairs at posh institutions, the flattening of the upper-middle class is a sight to behold.
What I said is this is what I struggle with. In general I think too much regulation is what caused this problem. And the question on my mind is, from where we are today, is there a liberalization of the rules that would also help maintain a mixed income neighborhood, rather than the current trajectory (quickly becoming an uber-wealthy country club).
The author acknowledges that a lot of the gentrification is the result of zoning rules, and has only proposed what are primarily less restrictive zoning rules as a potential solution.
Eh, let's take their word for it:
>But I’d like to see new homes sold at prices I could conceivably afford.
Doesn't gentrification happen not from spontaneous combos of zoning rules but when someone with money wants to live somewhere, so they do? It's part of the golden rule: he with the gold makes all the rules, unless you can go asymmetric economic warfare and fire back with zoning & NIMBY laws.
> A developer could likely fit 3-4 nice cottage homes on that lot, sell them for $500-700k, and make a profit
Denver takes 264 days to approve "multi-family or industrial projects with a valuation in excess of $1.5 million, such as a new apartment or office building, large additions" [1]. Construction loans in Colorado cost "8% to 13%" [2]. For a project with $1.5mm up-front costs, from land purchases to permit fees and legal costs, that comes to $87 to 141 thousand per project.
This isn't as bad as San Francisco, where permiting delays alone add hundreds of thousands of dollars to housing costs. But in addition to upzoning, it's something to be considered, particularly since Denver seems to categorise practically all impactful residential development as "major commercial."
[1] https://www.denvergov.org/Government/Agencies-Departments-Of...
[2] https://www.clearhouselending.com/commercial-loans/colorado/...
>particularly since Denver seems to categorise practically all impactful residential development as "major commercial."
This isn't an accident. They know what they're doing.
Every municipality tries to do this to the extent they think they can get away with it because it's an end run around your property right. There's all sorts of residential exemptions and precedents and case law and courts and politicians tend not to be in a hurry to screw homeowners because there's tons of them.
By classifying you as commercial it gives them a) all sorts of capricious authority to micromanage the pettiest of details and/or force you to expend money with no recourse except "haha, sue us peasant".
I think it's unlikely that their motivation is just to torture home owners.
It's absolutely vital to homeowners that no new housing be built, to keep Undesirables from moving in, but they need to do it in a way which leaves no blood on their hands so they can continue to have their In This House signs with no cognitive dissonance.
And this is how they get it: don't make it literally illegal to build housing, but make it economically impossible in practice. Then they can go "welp, nothing's getting built, I guess there's nothing we could've done", and as an added bonus they also get to say "looks like the free market can never fix our housing shortage!"
This is why we must overturn zoning - governments should not have the right to tell you how much you can build. Then we have a shot of forcing permitting to be faster. Make the delay a taking!
Want to see what no zoning looks like? Find your nearest organic strip mall development road, then imagine that in a neighborhood.
The delay is a taking
Wait, so they are simultaneously purposely not doing anything to help housing, but they are doing it as an evil scheme to let them bypass the free market and... help housing?
That seems like a contradiction.
This is happening in large parts of the EU as well. It's pretty mind blowing. Since the mid 2010s, the new build construction rate has slowed down to alarmingly low levels. A few years before that, there was an oversupply, yet they kept building. It's totally intentional.
Unsurprisingly, affordability is so bad. In lots of major cities, a one-bed rental takes around 50% of a mid-career post-tax salary. You have become an indentured servant for whatever real estate fund owns your property. Lots of regulatory capture behind the scenes.
Ironically, some parts of the UK, including Home Counties, are now much better than most EU, including Scandinavia, with lots of shared ownership and affordable housing schemes. It's really easy. Increasing the supply of homes, in particular first homes, and preventing predatory tactics to constrain supply.
> Today, the neighborhood is mixed-income with a range of families from different backgrounds
This is a good thing!
Overall I think this is simply an outcome of NIMBYism, regulators over regulating to justify their existence, and a K shaped economy.
There's nothing wrong with the market building what there is actual money in. No one should be forced to lose money to serve those who cannot afford the product. (That's the space of charities)
Denver seems to have done an amazing job, relative to other places I've been, at actually adding a lot more housing. The market likely would be _worse_ had there not been so much built (and building)
> No one should be forced to lose money to serve those who cannot afford the product. (That's the space of charities)
So, homelessness for the rest then?
(That's the space of charities)
And when the charities can't or don't?
No, we can't. Once could lower the rate of increase of housing prices (and, more realistically, land values), but "gentrification" isn't really just about pricing, but a change in preferences: Areas close to urban centers had low prices because people wanted to live in deep suburbs, far away from city crime and bad schools. Now they are desirable, and thus people far more affluent are going to bit outbidding the communities that live there anyway. So the gentrification is inevitable, and IMO any attempts to stop it are bad: Nobody has right to a character of the neighborhood, whether we are talking a Mexican American community or people that want racial covenants in their subdivision. The entire idea is just straight out illiberal in the broadest of senses.
It's true that the gentrification process speeds up when there is no building, as those differences in preferences mean existing tenants are competing with even richer people, and would have to move even further out, but the change in preferences still exists, and thus the gentrification is straight out unavoidable.
Besides, in almost every place where we have serious housing problems, the small changes proposed here are insufficient. When the land is expensive, the normal behavior everywhere is to redevelop plots to the maximum economically viable density. Turning 1 house into 4, which would sell for 500k each, doesn't make sense when the possibility of an apartment building is there. Single stairway apartments turn those 4 cottage homes into 16 3-4 bedroom units. If one is simplifying permitting anyway, why not simplify it for that density, and get far more out of the same land. Those 4 new cottages, now new, would not get redeveloped again for another 30, 40 years, so they would become difficult to afford really quickly. That's why you don't see many places actually attempting this low key densification, as it's way too much work for what you get.
Rights != Desires.
Desires are much more relevant in day-to-day politics. Rights are less frequently up for question.
well actually...
the city of vienna mandates that 2/3rd of any new housing is subsidized. so instead of controlling the price all over, you control the price of a part, and make sure that every neighborhood has room for low income families. in other words you enforce mixing. singapore is another city with a lot of subsidized housing.
And both have become massively unaffordable as a result, and have long lines to wait for housing. Vienna can't grow anymore as a result. The Christmas markets are still nice, but the city is frozen in amber.
Controls on housing prices make it easy to claim "look we made it cheaper" at the cost of forcing people to move away.
both have become massively unaffordable
that's every large city in germany too. except in vienna it only affects 1/3rd of the population because everyone else lives in affordable subsidized housing. exactly who has been forced to move away?
Vienna can't grow anymore as a result.
huh? vienna has been growing from 1.5 million to 2 million in the last 3 decades. and it hasn't even reached the peak population it had a century ago. it is also building whole new neighborhoods. i don't know how you get the idea that it can't grow anymore. nothing could be further from the truth. there is plenty of space for new development in the east for example.
Everyone who doesn't win the lottery for affordable housing has to leave.
it's not a lottery. it's based on need. if your income is high enough that you don't qualify then most likely you can afford regular housing. sure here are always edge cases, and some people slip through the gaps, and you also already have to be living in the city for a few years (the rule is now two years, it used to be longer), so it's not available to everyone, but if you are already a resident then it's unlikely that you'll have to leave.
I get that you really dislike what I'm saying. I'm sorry. I wish you understood that there were real criticisms.
i might understand that if you showed me the actual criticism and evidence that substantiated it.
the system in vienna may not be perfect, but it does better than any other large city in austria and germany and maybe even in europe. criticizing is easy, but i don't think it's fair when the situation everywhere else is worse.
You haven't asked a single question. It's always a waste to engage when people start with "you're wrong". If you engage differently next time I would try!
i am sorry it comes across that way. it's kind of difficult to use a different approach when you make claims that i believe to be without any basis. my believe could be wrong of course, but as i am from vienna i do pay attention to what happens there to an extent, and in particular i compare it to other german cities, so i believe myself to be informed about this matter.
your first claim: vienna has become unaffordable because of its subsidized housing.
that claim in itself makes no sense because subsidies are what makes housing affordable. if your argument is that it caused the prices of the private market to go up, then that is false too because munich and berlin have average rents that are even higher, and other german cities are on par. vienna private rent prices are not out of the ordinary for a city that size. in other words subsidizing housing can't have had any worse effect on the private rental market than whatever those cities in germany do.
your second claim: Vienna can't grow anymore as a result.
vienna is building almost 10k homes every year and has been doing so for the last decade or more. that may not be enough, but that's certainly not for lack of space. there is still plenty of space for the city to grow, especially in the east part of the city where farmland is within the city borders.
i am countering your claims. what do you expect me to ask here? do you have any evidence for your claims?
you say you wished that i understood that there were real criticisms.
well, what are these criticisms? again, compared to other large german cities which are mostly worse i find it hard to believe that there is any valid criticism against vienna's approach. but let's hear it, i am willing to accept that i am wrong because i may have missed something. so what am i missing?
I live in the Denver metro and have worked on zoning code in other municipalities. This is actually the first I've heard about the "Unlocking Home Choices" plan. This proposal seems like an improvement overall. Some of my thoughts:
> The second concept is to incentivize retention of existing buildings by allowing substantial new construction behind them. Basically, let people cash in on their backyard. This is a significant expansion of the accessory unit rules we have today, and the city’s concept art suggests that it would allow backyard cottages larger than the existing homes (a big change).
This is interesting and I wonder how it would change neighborhood dynamics. I'm not opposed at all because it enables more potential housing options. We have a few of these in the neighborhoods I frequent, but from what I've heard, it's somewhat cost prohibitive in the current form to be worth building one. If this helps make ADUs (maybe the ADU would become the original structure in this case), then that seems like progress.
> The third concept is to allow more units if one unit is deed-restricted to be permanently “affordable.” This is basically the same logic as the first proposal — let developers sell more square footage if they do something residents want: in this case, deed-restrict part of the square footage to be priced below market rate.
This would be helpful for allowing current residents with lower incomes than the newcomers to stay in the neighborhood without taking away an existing dwelling unit from the market. Deed-restrictions kind of concern me, but this seems like a decent compromise to prevent displacement.
> What I don’t see in any of the proposals so far is streamlining and expediting permitting for developers who pursue the path the city wants: more, less expensive homes, rather than fewer, more expensive homes.
Indirectly, the removal of parking minimums from the zoning code should help with this. I think there was also a change to allow single stairways in the zoning which creates a bit more incentive for developers and potentially eases the permit process.
"ideally, a property owner should be able to walk into city hall and leave with a permit the same day if they’re building the kind of housing that the city explicitly wants to see built."
Hear, hear! Finally someone gets it. Same day permits for all high density housing projects.
BTW, the NIMBYs are definitely going to fight the cottage homes tooth and nail otherwise. "Where will all the new cars go???"
One nice thing: Denver has already repealed parking requirements, so, they don't have legal standing to complain about it.
I'm down with killing restrictive zoning laws. But removing regulation has not historically been a great curb for the uber-wealthy.
Zoning is likely a big part of what causes people to become medium wealthy. Making it legal to build on every parcel also helps avoid concentrating wealth.
Agreed, the biggest boom towns have been in the South where restrictions are low and profits high, leaving some really ugly suburbs.
But they have cheap housing. I'll take ugly suburbs over people sleeping on the street.
But I suspect you'll find ugly suburbs and people sleeping in the streets.
Los Angeles, whose population is only 50% higher than Houston, has 25x as many people who are homeless (75k vs 3k).
If people couldn't afford food because there wasn't enough food grown, no one would think handing out food stamps would work. It's silly to think that doesn't work for housing.
1. https://www.governing.com/housing/how-houston-cut-its-homele...
2. https://www.lahsa.org/news?article=1051-lahsa-releases-final...
These may be accurate and real, but I also wonder if this might partially be because Houston sucks in terms of lived experience for the homeless so they tend to end up elsewhere?
Texas has a recent and storied history of just busing people out of state or into other cities for people it deems are problematic or they don't want to deal with. So it would not surprise me if some of the stats are cooked or they've partially swept the problem under the rug.
I gave actual stats. They also match my impressions driving around both cities. If you have stats about the scale of busing people out of state please do share.
What you've suggested may account for some of the difference. But "Houston has liberal zoning and builds more houses" is a far simpler explanation for the staggering 25x difference in homeless population between the cities.
How are suburbs ugly and cookie-cutter soulless shoebox-sized units are not?
I hate this thing where we can't do a thing that helps a ton of people, because it also helps people we hate.
It's so poisonous to politics, and everyone does it for their pet peeve.
Can't do permitting reform, can't fix education, can't loosen bad regulation, all of it because someone you don't like might benefit and fuck that guy.
Fixing housing is incredibly easy:
1. Remove Zoning / Deed Restrictions / Parking Minimums
2. Remove Red Tape (Environmental impact assessments, time cap approvals to a couple weeks, at cost fees)
3. Land Value Taxes
Watch as Gentrification suddenly goes away and infill development occurs. These complicated schemes are unnecessary.
Infill development is synonymous with gentrification to most people.
Some cheap side of town where a new apartment complex is built on a parking lot of a half-dead strip mall? If it’s “new” it’s going to cost new. Local neighborhood residents won’t be able to afford commercial rent for a mom & pop restaurant compared to bougie-looking expensive shops. That’s gentrification, practically caused by infill development.
I agree that development is crucial, and agree with a lot of your comment. The fact of the matter is that new developments are by definition more expensive to rent out, so any kind of development in a rundown neighborhood will have a tendency to increase prices & drive out residents. There’s no easy way around that fact without government intervention.
The best we can hope for is maxing our development in dense spaces to the point that it won’t need to undergo another such drastic change any time soon, and having government programs to help the people impacted.
>Remove Zoning
>Remove Red Tape (Environmental impact assessments
I absolutely understand what prompts this desperation, but much like the desperation that prompted the election of Trump, it's very, very much more bad than it is good.
What's the problem with removing zoning? Which I interpreted, charitably, as "remove low-density zoning" and not as "let anyone build a lead smelter in their yard". (Also, a suburban area is probably not a lead smelting operation's preferred location anyway).
Environmental impact assessments are great if they actually do what they say. But they can also be weaponized to block any new development in existing cities. Forcing suburban sprawl into less populated areas is a worse outcome if you want to protect the environment.
It's not clear that there's any bad in practice. All the fears I've seen about eliminating zoning turn out to be misunderstandings of either law or economics.
Jane Jacobs had a chapter about fixing this in 1961, and she's 10x more right now than she was then.
> it's very, very much more bad than it is good
Is it? I don’t have a clear picture in either direction. What does an environmental impact assessment for a housing project typically result in?
Well, I've witnessed this on dozens of houses in the town where my ex-wife grew up. The local river was slow-moving in a shallow river valley. Every spring, it would flood, and houses built within a half-mile of the main river would flood up to the second floor.
Would the environmental assessment help? I'd like to think so, but when I almost bought in the area, I discovered that the floodplain maps were "optimistic."
Insurance solves this for you. You don't need government. I bet that town allowed those houses anyway, so zoning didn't prevent it.
That's not what an environmental impact assessment is. Environmental impact assessments look at potential harms to the environment, not the property. It would look at if building a house would impact the wildlife, and sometimes other related phenomenon
Nope. I will f-ing yeet that baby along with the bathwater.
Every idiot (they're not even useful anymore FFS, look at the results) says this based on abstract assessments of individual rules and laws. But in practice the overall effect of the system is that all those environmental assessments and stormwater permits and all the other things aren't even speed bumps for big business interests with lawyers and engineers on staff. Those interests can construe any evil as compliant and do so at cost. The rules are unscalable cliffs to "normal" people and businesses who can't justify paying mid four to low five figures up front for projects that might not even generate that much value.
You're saying regulation is a moat for monopolists?
There are millions of homes that are super cheap and no one wants to live there. I think we missed a real opportunity for WFH to allow people to move where things are more affordable, rather than having everyone live in mega cities and complain of high prices.
If you're curious, why this scenario hasn't panned out. I'd highly recommend you read: The Triumph of the City
https://www.amazon.com/Triumph-City-Greatest-Invention-Healt...
I suspect that book was written with an extremely optimistic view of urban spaces. My experience in urban spaces has been depressing, isolating, cement, and asphalt. You can't do anything without somebody sticking their hand out asking for money.
I'm glad I'm living on my 10,000 ft² lot with multiple fruit trees, multiple vegetable gardens, berry gardens, bird-friendly bushes, and neighbors who are a good distance away from me. The only thing I would change is to reduce the light pollution so you can see six-magnitude stars from the backyard.
Now, if somebody wants to buy the property and convert it to a dense housing space, after I'm dead, great, I won't be in a position to care. But right now, I very much care about getting rid of lawns, building bird-friendly habitats, and growing plants you can eat.
For the most part, remote work ended up with people moving to already desirable remote communities, and exporting the housing crisis there without solving anything for the expensive metro areas.
Is gentrification a bad thing?
Neighbourhoods change, some get richer and some get poorer. That is the way of things. Both poor and rich alike need somewhere to live.
I guess I haven't seen neighborhoods get particularly poorer for some time, unless we're counting the tent cities.
Many places like this in the Rust Belt or Appalachia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_of_Detroit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_ghost_towns_in_the_Un...
The poor should get to share in the benefits of the improving community too, instead of having to move out, probably further from work, friends, etc. There are ways to control for this, of course, so it doesn't have to be so. Honestly, the poor get screwed over systemically in so many ways, I wonder where this ranks in relation to the others.
Huge fan of zoning reform, however I'd love to see equal effort in lending reform. The availability of multi-million dollar mortgages on 30 year terms means that we all get poorer. Getting people into owned homes is a dream left over from the Clinton era that has warped into an ever expanding pool of debt and over sized buildings. Developers will build to the limit of what people can afford (and slightly beyond), and that is defined by mortgage policy. The harsh reality is that as long as you're supporting a system where a 1k sqft house can cost 300, 400, 500k you're not helping anyone who isn't in the business of lending. The only way to reverse the trend is to limit the pool of available capital and bring the sale value of property down.
> limit the pool of available capital
How would you do this?
> and bring the sale value of property down
Can't happen without causing a lot of pain. In large part due to the debt. Holding prices flat in nominal terms is the best-case outcome; holding them flat in real terms the most likely one. Either, however, beats real appreciation.
(For what it's worth, I'm a homeowner with a jumbo mortgage.)
You cant just 4x every plot because that would destroy the ultilties that have been allocated.
I have never considered this nor have I heard it brought up before. Good point!
I am only aware of this because we actually ran into the problem. We started allowing more subdivisions and densification in our city and the waste water infrastructure got quickly pushed to its limits now we have to halt construction while the new water infrastructure is upgraded to accommodate for the massively increased zoning density.
That's interesting - naively I would expect the wastewater infrastructure to be overbuilt enough to manage larger than normal rains, which are usually several times over typical household wastewater production.
> naively I would expect the wastewater infrastructure to be overbuilt enough to manage larger than normal rains, which are usually several times over typical household wastewater production
It depends on the city—some cities do indeed handle rainwater with the normal sewer system, but most have an entirely separate system for rainwater [0]. But either way, if you pave more roads, you're always going to have more rainwater to deal with, regardless of which system of pipes you use.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storm_drain#Combined_sewers
1. The parent was mentioning densification - that doesn't automatically mean more roads.
2. It's not just roads but also roofs etc., is it common to drain the house roof into a different system than the rest of the house? Of course in a house with a large lot you can drain into a garden or whatever but that's not possible in densely built areas. In our city it all ends up in one system but of course we've had a sewer system since the middle ages or so.
> 1. The parent was mentioning densification - that doesn't automatically mean more roads.
Yes of course, I forgot where I was in the thread, sorry.
> 2. It's not just roads but also roofs etc., is it common to drain the house roof into a different system than the rest of the house? Of course in a house with a large lot you can drain into a garden or whatever but that's not possible in densely built areas. In our city it all ends up in one system but of course we've had a sewer system since the middle ages or so.
I'm mainly familiar with smaller buildings, but I know that it's illegal to drain rainwater into the main sewer system, so presumably the bigger buildings are hooked up to the storm sewer system.
The climate here is kinda bizzare though: it's fairly common to get a few days of +15°C while there's still 3' of snow on the ground, and as you can imagine, that causes a ton of runoff from all the melting. And very little here is more than a century old, so everything is comparatively modern.
Thankfully this article is about the zoning codes, not code as in computer programs.
Page title is "Can we code our way out of gentrification?".
The use of "code" is confusing for HN, but "gentrification" is a useful red flag about the content.
> If units... "affordable housing"...
Stop. Trying. To. Fix. Prices.
The only way to "fix" prices is to increase supply, which the plan does really well otherwise!
This was the subject of extensive proof in a recent HN thread, where shockingly... the only thing that moved the needle was... shockingly... increasing supply. No matter of "well yeah, but we can do it differently this time" will fix it. You can only increase supply. Its the only lever you have.
Very curious about what tools or platforms are used to make the visual housing figures with highlighting like you see in strategy 2 figure. any tips much appreciated
I’m pretty sure those were drawn in SketchUp
havent used sketchup as much but i wonder if they have like stock templates, will have to look
A rare anti-Betteridge's law of headlines article.
Yes, there are laws that, if passed, would stop or slow or even reverse the increasing price of real estate. Would they pass? Hard to say and probably not quickly.
As has been repeated many times: it's in the financial interest of people who own property to increase their property's value by constraining supply via zoning/building codes, and they usually have a good amount of influence in the local politics that determine these rules.
The solve is fairly straightforward: allow absolute maximum density so long as it is built safely.
You'll get tall apartment buildings pretty quick. Then everyone can go to the schools and enjoy the low crime and fast fire response.
But that isn't allowed because incumbents don't want it.
There's not much new about this... it's the same story all over the US.
> it's the same story all over the US.
At least some places are different:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47433058
No, it's not. Austin's population growth has been at _best_ stagnant. And I made a prediction that it had actually decreased.
We'll see once 2025 ACS data is released.
Plans like this would be interesting to me if I believed it were possible to get all the necessary parties to agree.
Thought it was something like using computer programming to save the market lol
My neighborhood in California added plenty of these and it didn’t change the vibe of the neighborhood at all. It’s a great YIMBY solution because it satisfies both the pro and anti development crowds.
Right - the vibe of the neighborhood matters. More than the word "vibe" implies.
The answer is "no".
That's because WE DO NOT HAVE a housing crisis. And yes, I'm not crazy.
We have 1.1 housing units per family right _now_. We likely will have the record number of housing units per capita within about 2 years just due to the current pipeline of new housing. These numbers are easy to verify.
Why are we talking about housing then? That's because we have a JOBS crisis. The only available good jobs are concentrated in a dwindling number of dense areas. And making it easier to build makes the jobs crisis even worse.
Don't believe me? Look at Vancouver, BC. They did everything: automated transit, soul-crushingly depressive high rises near transit stations, (de-fact) prohibited foreign ownership of housing, streamlined permitting.
Guess what happened? If your guess is "plentiful cheap housing" then make another guess.
This is the first time I've heard of this locational jobs crisis. Where did you learn about this? I would like to read more about it
There is not a lot of good literature, actually.
I'm not saying anything even remotely factually controversial. Housing units per household: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=15tRv
It's also not controversial that major job density increases are happening in a few select metros: https://www.route-fifty.com/workforce/2019/06/job-density-re... or if you look more broadly, that smaller cities in the US are dying out.
I simply arrived at a different conclusion: we don't need to continue deepening this death spiral by "building more".
That st louis fed link doesn't seem to show any clear trend to me. Looks like we're actually on a downturn after a peak.
Regardless, I don't understand what your proposed solution to this supposed "jobs crisis" is.
It's a bit misleading because the Y axis is not starting at 0.
> Regardless, I don't understand what your proposed solution to this supposed "jobs crisis" is.
Tax the dense office space, or do cap&trade. Incentivize remote work. Treat commute time as work time. Prohibit dense housing except in special cases (university campuses, military bases, senior living, etc.). Promote and subsidize self-driving cars.
> making it easier to build makes the jobs crisis even worse
Why?
It creates for companies more incentives to move to these areas, as they have easier access to a larger talent pool. Which in turn makes housing there even more expensive.
You’re describing clusters of productivity and economies of scale. It sounds like your solution to the housing crisis is people should be poorer?
This is not "economy of scale", this is more of a "pollution death spiral" and "unpriced externalities".
A factory that dumps raw waste into rivers is more efficient and can produce widgets more cheaply than a factory that takes care to clean up the waste.
A firm in a dense city core can get talent more easily, and it'll have advantage (on average, in the long run) over a firm that has a fully remote workforce. The negative externalities (living in poor conditions in an expensive city) are offloaded onto the workers. E.g. the housing square footage keeps decreasing: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/charted-the-growing-gap-bet...
That article has cherrypicked dates.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/COMPSFLAM1FQ
Also, firm in a dense city can get better talent, but those negative externalities (and I would argue these externalities are not clearly caused by the mployer) are made up for through increased salaries the firm must pay compared to areas with lower living costs.
Care to explain the cherry-picking? The average square footage was growing steadily (except for the 2008 crisis) and the inflection point happened around 2012 when the death spiral started in earnest.
It has been on the downward trend since then.
> Also, firm in a dense city can get better talent, but those negative externalities (and I would argue these externalities are not clearly caused by the mployer) are made up for through increased salaries the firm must pay compared to areas with lower living costs.
Except that the increased salary does NOT compensate for the increased cost of living. And firms absolutely don't pay for their impact on infrastructure.
My favorite example: Seattle. Each household will end up paying around $150k in additional taxes for the new transit that will benefit primarily dense office holders in the downtown.
> Care to explain the cherry-picking? The average square footage was growing steadily (except for the 2008 crisis) and the inflection point happened around 2012 when the death spiral started in earnest.
It is clearly cherry picked because the graph begins in 2015, which (as you can see in the one I linked) is the exact peak of the new build house sizes. A more honest article would show a larger date range.
Additionally, I feel it makes sense that new builds are getting smaller. People are generally having fewer children these days, so there shouldn't be as much need for huge houses.
> Except that the increased salary does NOT compensate for the increased cost of living. And firms absolutely don't pay for their impact on infrastructure.
It may not entirely make up for the cost of living, but in most cases I would say it certainly makes a big dent. And the rest of the difference can just be explained by the fact that people want to live in cities. So shouldn't it make sense that the cost of living is higher in these areas given that there is more demand for them?
> My favorite example: Seattle. Each household will end up paying around $150k in additional taxes for the new transit that will benefit primarily dense office holders in the downtown.
I think it's strange to frame public transit as primarily benefiting dense office-holders. There are tons of other entities in cities besides just companies in offices. It's a public good, and transit generally benefits everyone. Citizens, companies, government, educational institutions, etc.
Also please link to where I can read more about the $150k number.
> It is clearly cherry picked because the graph begins in 2015, which (as you can see in the one I linked) is the exact peak of the new build house sizes.
I mean... That was exactly the point.
> A more honest article would show a larger date range.
Sure. It provides an even better illustration about how the runaway urbanism resulted in breaking the previous trend of increasing living area.
> Additionally, I feel it makes sense that new builds are getting smaller. People are generally having fewer children these days, so there shouldn't be as much need for huge houses.
You might have cause and effect confused here.
> I think it's strange to frame public transit as primarily benefiting dense office-holders.
Why is it strange? In the counter-factual world without the dense office core, the new transit would have been useless.
> There are tons of other entities in cities besides just companies in offices.
And none of them requires the amount of traffic that justifies $150k per household.
> Also please link to where I can read more about the $150k number.
https://mynorthwest.com/kiro-opinion/sound-transit-3-34-5-bi...
>I mean... That was exactly the point.
Great. So we agree it is cherry picked.
> Sure. It provides an even better illustration about how the runaway urbanism resulted in breaking the previous trend of increasing living area.
I don't follow the logic here. Why would 2015 be the tipping point? What's so special about that year? The US has been increasingly urbanizing since WW2.
https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/usa/uni...
> You might have cause and effect confused here.
Just to be clear, you're suggesting that people are having fewer kids (fertility had a recent peak in 2007) because new builds (which are just a small percentage of total housing stock!) have lost a few square feet? I find that to be laughable.
> Why is it strange? In the counter-factual world without the dense office core, the new transit would have been useless.
1. There are more than just offices in CBDs. There are also retail, restaurants, entertainment venues, residential, etc.
2. This ignores the benefit to the worker. And employer/employee relationship goes two-ways. You assign all the benefits to the employers (who gain access to a larger talent pool), while ignoring the fact that this benefits workers too by increasing the pool of jobs they can reliably and comfortably commute to.
3. Economic gains for employers are not purely extractive. A thriving and dynamic centeral business district helps provide income for residents, drive increased investment, and foster innovation.
> And none of them requires the amount of traffic that justifies $150k per household.
Sports venues. Concerts. Festivals. Parades. Any large gathering of people. Not to mention that it's still a good thing to have for general use to go anywhere, even at non-max-capacity times.
https://mynorthwest.com/kiro-opinion/sound-transit-3-34-5-bi...
Not seeing that $150k per household number anywhere in that article. Looks like $10k per person is the number they come up with. Expensive to be sure, but not quite the number you somehow arrived at.
> negative externalities (living in poor conditions in an expensive city) are offloaded onto the workers
Cities are more efficient in practically every way than subsidized rural developments. It’s really weird to flip that around as an externality. (Disclaimer: I moved from New York to Wyoming. Thanks for your subsidies, I guess.)
There absolutely are jobs in remote places. But the people there aren’t as valuable as someone who will bump into like-minded colleagues and cultural expression as part of their existence in a cluster.
> Cities are more efficient in practically every way than subsidized rural developments
No, they're not. It's the other way around, in fact. Suburbs subsidize cities (on average, again).
The dense city cores produce most of the _corporate_ income tax, because that's where the companies are headquartered. But most of _personal_ income tax comes from suburbs. This is only now getting close to flipping around.
Cities also have YUUUUGE expenses that simply don't happen in sparse areas. E.g. infrastructure like water or sewer is wildly expensive in cities because of the planning overhead. Case in point: San Francisco spent almost half a billion rebuilding a few blocks of road.
Cities also require EXPENSIVE public transit. One ride on a bus/subway in the US costs around $20. I'm talking about the true cost (number of trips / total expenses), not the farebox cost. And with capex it's almost incalculable, with crazy numbers like $50 per ride for Seattle.
The TLDR; version:
1. Infrastructure in suburbs might end up being a bit more expensive on a per-capita basis. Or it might not, depending on the way you do accounting.
2. In any case, this difference is not at all significant.
3. Suburbs are _not_ subsidized, and in fact generate most of the wealth in the US.
Do you have any citations on that? Very curious because it’s a very heterodox viewpoint you are expressing.
The thing is, I don't actually know good sources that aggregate all this data. I'm collecting all the references and I'm planning to write a book.
If you have a refutation of Triumph of the City, it will be groundbreaking. Until it’s published, throwing in like one credible source would make your comments more serious.
I read "Triumph of the City" about 15 years ago. It's a well-researched book, and it literally makes the same points as I do. In particular, it describes the density death spiral much better than I can. It's a bit outdated regarding the carbon footprint because it was written before the EVs and self-driving but that's a fairly minor point.
Its biggest problem is that it was written before the negatives of the density death spiral became apparent.
The cities in the early 2000-s were the main benefactors of the global crime collapse. So suddenly, Times Square in NYC transformed from a blighted area into the world's most valuable real estate. How could you be negative about urbanism seeing that? Housing in cities was also relatively cheap because cities used to be less desirable than suburbs.
If I were to summarize, "Triumph of the City" is factually correct. Just as the statement: "coal power plants are a triumph of engineering, providing cheap, reliable, and accessible power".
Edit: another important thing that he's missing is the end of the population growth. So now it's a nearly zero-sum game: a new housing unit in Manhattan means one more dilapidated house in rural Ohio.
The premise is that the author is a libertarian, except that housing in the neighborhood they live in should be fixed at the price that they can afford, and that the character of the neighborhood from the point that they moved into it should be preserved.
It's only real gentrification when upper-middle class YIMBYs get forced out.
This may be a non-sequitur to your point—and what I'm reading as a put-down makes me less likely to read the fine article that I indeed have not (to the credit of the potency of the point that I hope I'm grasping).
Between AI and whatever housing problems are being felt by co-founders and advisors and chairs at posh institutions, the flattening of the upper-middle class is a sight to behold.
What I said is this is what I struggle with. In general I think too much regulation is what caused this problem. And the question on my mind is, from where we are today, is there a liberalization of the rules that would also help maintain a mixed income neighborhood, rather than the current trajectory (quickly becoming an uber-wealthy country club).
Except that's not what the author argued, at all.
The author acknowledges that a lot of the gentrification is the result of zoning rules, and has only proposed what are primarily less restrictive zoning rules as a potential solution.
Eh, let's take their word for it: >But I’d like to see new homes sold at prices I could conceivably afford.
Doesn't gentrification happen not from spontaneous combos of zoning rules but when someone with money wants to live somewhere, so they do? It's part of the golden rule: he with the gold makes all the rules, unless you can go asymmetric economic warfare and fire back with zoning & NIMBY laws.
No because gentrification is a side effect of private property, not insufficient technology.
He’s talking about legal codes, read the article before commenting ffs