isn't it a slippery slope though??
You have to just keep adding supply but unfortunately the amount of living space that can be built in an urban area is constrained at some point both vertically and horizontally.
So if you add a ton of houses you have the same problem just many years later but now everyone is living in a massive overcrowded area. Adding supply seems to just be postponing the problem.
The real solution imo is to spread out the jobs to other areas so that these major urban areas aren't the only places people have to move to find work.
There's tons of gorgeous places between the coasts that wonderful to live but there's no jobs.
> Isn't it a slippery slope though?? You have to just keep adding supply but unfortunately the amount of living space that can be built in an urban area is constrained at some point both vertically and horizontally.
You're absolutely right. There's definitely real limits, vertically and horizontally, to how much density is physically possible.
As an upper limit, we have good historical examples density of around 1.2 million people per square kilometer being workable. I don't think any part of the US today comes close to that - what data I can find says that the most densely populated part of the US is at 66,000 people per square km. That's multiple orders of magnitude different.
With that in mind, I think it's possible that we haven't yet hit any real physical or space-based limits in American cities. Only political ones.
> isn't it a slippery slope though?? You have to just keep adding supply but unfortunately the amount of living space that can be built in an urban area is constrained at some point both vertically and horizontally.
That's not a slippery slope though, it's an eventual limit that you might hit some day. If adding housing now is a win, add the housing. It makes people better off today.
> So if you add a ton of houses you have the same problem just many years later but now everyone is living in a massive overcrowded area.
Why would those areas be overcrowded instead of just appropriately dense? The suburbs, for example, are under crowded and that's a huge problem.
> The real solution imo is to spread out the jobs to other areas so that these major urban areas aren't the only places people have to move to find work.
I completely agree with the general theme here. I was hoping remote work would have a larger impact here than it has but alas major tech companies can't get away from a few select cities.
But I would just say that in the spirit of spreading things out we should be mindful to not spread too much. Farmland should stay farmland, forests should stay forests or areas that were previously home to dwindling populations of humans should return to nature. Appropriate levels of urban density (walkable neighborhoods, you can keep your car and your SFH still) should be the goal because it solves a lot of problems. We already have a model for cities that has lasted for thousands of years. It works because it's based on human evolution. I have yet to see a model that deviates from this that is successful.
> You have to just keep adding supply but unfortunately the amount of living space that can be built in an urban area is constrained at some point both vertically and horizontally.
In cases like NYC/SFO I do think that's a problem. As you build more it actually has the unique phenomenon of becoming more expensive because you have to buy land, you have to build the building, and you have to attract tenants that can afford to pay for those things + your profit. And naturally you aren't going to lower rent on your existing places because that contradicts any reason to build new units. This isn't an absolute truth, but I think New York City proves the point. If you could just add supply to lower prices, New York would be much cheaper than, say, Columbus or Pittsburgh.
Agglomeration is important to our economy. Forcing people into Fordlandia does not work and trying to would destroy our ability to compete on the world stage.
Look at San Jose Diridon Station. Caltrain and links to Oakland and San Francisco go through it. It is in the middle of Silicon Valley and yet the station is empty during the day surrounded by parking lots.
>The real solution imo is to spread out the jobs to other areas so that these major urban areas aren't the only places people have to move to find work.
While that definitely works whenever doable, I'd say investing in much better infrastructure to reduce commuting time and complexity is the other big factor. Living far away from the workplace isn't a biggie if I can take for example a train and be there in a reasonable amount of time. For sure an expensive solution but a solution that will pay off nevertheless.
This article does not make sense to me. City's main point of attractiveness is high density. When you have a place with lots of resources ( usually near rivers ) people will move there. The more people, the more business which means if there's any place for any nice market then hitting the biggest cities first is a good bet. Yes, this means the more houses you build in an area, the more people will move there which will increase the attractiveness of a city. Attractiveness can be represented as value. This, in no way means you should stop building houses in places that are the most attractive. Quite the opposite. Build until the price drops or the cost of even higher density outstrips the benefit that could be gained. Eventually too many people will be priced out. You might not like the idea that only the very rich can occupy the highest value spot in a city but thats just free market.
"They added two more lanes to the freeway, but the traffic is worse than ever.” But that’s a wonderful result"
No, its not. Thoughput is a function of speed * vehicles. Having a 6 lane highway at a crawl is as effective as a single lane highway at decent speed. Induced demand is complicated to grasp but the core is that highways are terrible at moving lots of people and any additional highway will make more people drive to match the highway's new capacity. A neverending traffic loop. Trains, trams, buses and cyclepaths all move more people which should be prioritised. Many countries atleast have priority for buses which makes them a better option. Most american cities treat them like another car but with lower status.
> any additional highway will make more people drive to match the highway's new capacity.
If you build a 6 lane highway in Alaska, it's not going to get traffic. Induced demand is really supressed demand; people avoid trips because the cost in time is too high, increasing throughput allows more trips to be made at the same time cost, and so more trips are made.
But, if you look at Caltrans reports before and after highway widening, there's usually a decrease in the hours of congestion. At least until population growth overcomes the increased capacity. Mass transit can certainly move more people per vehicle and that can make more throughput, but it also limits the viable trips. If you loom at somewhere like the LA area, it's hard to live near where you work, especially if you have two workers in the household or you change jobs. Some routes have mass transit options, but a lot of commutes would take all day without a car; especially if the commute is at off hours.
The myth of induced demand needs to die a short and painless death. The confusion between something at capacity being expanded and the expansion itself causing the increase is too prevalent.
Yes, the main benefit of trains and proper buses is that you wont get stuck in traffic. So in the worst case scenario you'll see troughput increases as a function of ridership (more occupancy, more trains) while trying to battle overcrowding. By adding more trains and buses. Trains have another benefit to the population that they can travel at higher speed, so the induced demand with trains can get even higher because of the large distance you can travel if you travel at 200+ kmph.
Induced demand isn't actually a bad thing unless your transportation gets less efficient the more people use them. Which is definitely the case with cars. Just look at the amount of parking spaces needed to cope with peak hours. This can all be avoided if trains and buses are a viable and comfortable option for people.
Just think about the average car ridership only having 1.2 passengers. While a bus that takes up three parking spaces can have 50-100 people. Or a train that could hold up to 1500 passengers.
Exactly. That's why tram+bike combo in Netherlands is so effective. People travel big distance by train and small distance to work, home and shops. Since trams are very efficient at moving a lot of people car congestion will be reduced. If number of people using trams increases more than their capacity, surprise, you can add another section without hiring one more driver. So big capacity transport that can be adapted to demand and that has priority on the road(it's own lane) and is frequent enough basically can satisfy most of the traffic human needs
This could be, but usually public transport is more effective. Eg. A Bus can transport 4-8 more people, than a car for the same space used on the streets. This rate is even more increased with trains or trams. Therefore people need to demand 4-8 times more public transport than with cars to equalize the effects.
This holds true as long as the population is constant, becaus a single human can not spend an indefintly amount of time in public transport.
If the population can increase eg. Housing Markets in cities, this wont work. If you could double or quadruple the amount of available houses instantly the demand would also go up after some time…
The scaling curve of a tram or bus is very different than for cars. A bus takes up about as much room as 3 cars and holds up to 200 passengers. The typical car at rush hour has 1 passenger.
You can pack a lot of buses onto a bus lane. Trains and trams scale even better because you can expand the same vehicle by adding more sections.
Well written and fairly convincing. Slightly off topic but the side point about highway capacity expansion projects interests me. I’m guessing it won’t be popular. But it’s true that more people are traveling and choosing to travel despite the congestion. I’ve never heard the urbanists so quick to dismiss such projects address these points.
The problem of the highway expansion is not damage done by the highway, or that the highway itself doesn't increase value for land far away: It's that the very subsidized highway later gives us horribly inefficient land uses which don't pay for themselves.
So yes, the widening of the highway makes the suburb more valuable, but the second effects make the city spend more resources on parking and makes the streets worse for anyone nearby. It's no picnic for the suburb either: A car-centric infrastructure basically bans anything else. That would be fine and all, if ultimately it produced more value than the alternatives. But look at the parking lots that were designed to never get completely full on black friday, back when it was actually a time where people did local shopping. Nowadays it's all wasted infrastructure, expensive to redevelop. If you thought that the commercial real estate office in dense cities was in trouble, don't look at the one in suburbs.
So it isn't really the highway, but all the things that relying on the highway leads to.
Not to mention how loud highways are. A concrete freeway generates enough noise at rush hour to make conversation impossible a quarter mile away. Nobody who lives nearby spends any time outside.
The issue from an urbanism perspective is not really that highways fill up immediately.
The problem is generally selling capacity expansion as "reducing congestion" when it does nothing of the sort. That, and the capacity gets used so quickly that you are very quickly spending yourself into a hole trying to build ever more highway capacity. The thing about a train is that it's very hard to make it so crowded the service degrades due to congestion, at least not within the first 20-50 years.
This black hole of money needed for highway congestion then starts pulling away from other municipal and transportation funding needs.
But that's true of public transit projects too. They always promise to reduce congestion and never actually do. Congestion charging is probably the only way to really reduce congestion and in many ways the solution is worse than the problem.
And, more than not being a problem, the highway filling up immediately is actually a benefit. Because more people are able and are choosing to travel, to accomplish whatever they need and want to accomplish.
Granted, the externality costs of all that car travel are high. But that's almost a separate issue and one that we really should be solving by a better accounting of costs and additional taxes. It's a shame that won't happen.
It'd be interesting to think about ways we could implement congestion control on highways .. every thread I've read implicitly assumes it's not possible
Urbanists don't like highways because highways are generally sold to the public as a way to reduce congestion; what usually happens is the extra lanes fill up immediately. The capacity of a train is much larger and it's a lot cheaper to increase throughput on a train line (by running more trains, longer trains, etc) than it is on a highway.
Urbanists disagree that more VMT is inherently good. VMT is good because of why people make trips - see their family, go to work, shop etc.
The alternative isn't eliminating those trips. It's taking the trillions of dollars we waste and spending it on an alternative, more efficient modes that deliver better outcomes (travel time, cost, speed, comfort, etc)
I agree that VMT is good because of why people make those trips. If you're saying spending all that money on public transit would be a better way to help more people make more of those trips, then you'd be unequivocally wrong in much of the US. Go to someplace like Dallas and marvel at the nearly empty buses and light rail run cars. Maybe we could focus on dramatically improving public transit in someplace suitably dense like West LA. If only the politics allowed it.
Most people don't object to increasing rural highway capacity. However, the increased traffic has to go somewhere, and nobody likes busy streets in their neighborhood. Not in the suburbs, and not in the city. People generally want less traffic in their area, not more.
Urbanists tend to prefer walkable cities. They want to use less above-ground space for traffic and parking, leaving more space for buildings, parks, and public squares. Highway capacity expansions work against that, because they encourage more people to drive into the city.
Urbanists don't view the fact that more people are choosing to travel as good, because of the destructive effects of that travel (noise, pollution, parking, etc.)
I've lived in European cities and American cities. American cities are more car centric and its actually more convenient. Many cities in Europe are so congested and difficult to drive but its by design rather than a bug - it means people are more likely to get trains to get out of town. I do see that more roads encourages more cars and driving, I've found it to be a good thing.
Car dependency generally results in negative health outcomes though.
* driving is just less healthy than walking, biking, or walking to and from public transport
* driving causes high noise pollution and emissions; EVs will solve the latter but not the former, since above low speeds most of the noise is tires rolling against roads
* increased driving in the US has led to higher fatality rates for the people still walking and biking
* increased driving leads to lower funding levels for other types of transport since road infrastructure is so expensive, and not everybody can afford a car to avoid getting left behind
In the 1910s when Manhattan's population was 2.3 million, price per square foot (PPSF) was $8. In the 2010s when the population was 1.6 million PPSF was $1070.
Inflation from the 1910s to the 2010s was about 22x. PPSF in Manhattan rose by 134x over the same time, even as the population fell.
I agree that real estate is complex and simply plotting density vs price along any dimension isn't very useful. My analysis is as complex as Scott Alexander's and arrives at the opposite conclusion.
Sure Manhattan is expensive but you can easily find a 2 bedroom in Jackson Heights for under $300k and still take the F train to work in the city. In the Bay Area that price point will have you on the freeway 4+ hours every day.
>you can easily find a 2 bedroom in Jackson Heights for under $300k
I agree with your overall point, but home prices are somewhat misleading in NYC. The "affordable" places tend to have lots of fees. That $300k 2b in Jackson Heights that's within walking distance to a subway line is probably going to have a $900 HOA.
HOAs in CA are frequently above $500, so the $900 HOA won’t skew the payment that much, plus you also have to account for amenities included in the HOA. CA HOA amenities tend to be fairly light and building/lot maintenance focused.
You’re not comparing like for like. You might as well say, if you want a 2000sqft detached house within a 30 minute commute in the Bay Area you could do so for under 2 million there and it cost hundreds of millions in Manhattan.
Like-for-like: "within a 30 minute commute" would include areas outside of Manhattan. https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/187-Cambridge-Ave-Jersey-... is $774,000, 2,000 sq. ft., has something resembling a yard, and is a 22-minute drive to central Manhattan.
Building a large supply of high-rise apartments can certainly decrease prices... see e.g. downtown Chicago which has cycles of over-building apartments resulting in lower rents, then waiting for rents to rise before building more.
Arguing about housing economics with entrenched opinions is essentially pointless. It’s like arguing about evolution against intelligent design.
Nobody can make a controlled test to demonstrate millions of years of macro evolution, or to demonstrate the effects of housing policy on home prices. Smaller controlled tests or past observations are all explained away by countless confounders.
All that we’re left with is partisan bickering.
It’s up to you to decide whether your opinion on housing economics is like evolution or like intelligent design.
Houston isn't weighed down by the income of tech workers and lawyers, Austin is. You can build all the housing you want but if people working at the grocery store are competing with tech workers, and at some point you're having to commute labor in, the costs of everything will continue to rise.
They're competing with tech workers because there isn't enough housing. If you "build all the housing you want" then there's enough for both groups of people and you don't get a competition where the grocery workers lose out.
For context, I'm from Dallas. The same thing happened there. What were affordable apartments and starter homes went up in price as businesses consolidated there with high paid workers. The metroplex has worked to expand to all available land and yet they still struggle to make houses and apartments affordable.
Readit News
* https://cayimby.org/its-only-a-housing-market-if-you-can-mov...
* https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/articles/...
* https://kevinerdmann.substack.com/p/we-need-affordable-housi...
Just off the top of my head.
Edit: Wow, some of the comments here are like exhibit A for Jerusalem Demsas' piece on how housing breaks people's brains:
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/11/us-housing... - "Supply skepticism and shortage denialism are pushing against the actual solution to the housing crisis: building enough homes."
So if you add a ton of houses you have the same problem just many years later but now everyone is living in a massive overcrowded area. Adding supply seems to just be postponing the problem.
The real solution imo is to spread out the jobs to other areas so that these major urban areas aren't the only places people have to move to find work.
There's tons of gorgeous places between the coasts that wonderful to live but there's no jobs.
You're absolutely right. There's definitely real limits, vertically and horizontally, to how much density is physically possible.
As an upper limit, we have good historical examples density of around 1.2 million people per square kilometer being workable. I don't think any part of the US today comes close to that - what data I can find says that the most densely populated part of the US is at 66,000 people per square km. That's multiple orders of magnitude different.
With that in mind, I think it's possible that we haven't yet hit any real physical or space-based limits in American cities. Only political ones.
That's not a slippery slope though, it's an eventual limit that you might hit some day. If adding housing now is a win, add the housing. It makes people better off today.
If the entire US lived at the population density of Manhattan, everyone would fit in 4500 sq miles, which is only seven times the size of Houston.
Just let people build dense housing in the places where people want to live. There is no realistic possibility of running out of space.
Why would those areas be overcrowded instead of just appropriately dense? The suburbs, for example, are under crowded and that's a huge problem.
> The real solution imo is to spread out the jobs to other areas so that these major urban areas aren't the only places people have to move to find work.
I completely agree with the general theme here. I was hoping remote work would have a larger impact here than it has but alas major tech companies can't get away from a few select cities.
But I would just say that in the spirit of spreading things out we should be mindful to not spread too much. Farmland should stay farmland, forests should stay forests or areas that were previously home to dwindling populations of humans should return to nature. Appropriate levels of urban density (walkable neighborhoods, you can keep your car and your SFH still) should be the goal because it solves a lot of problems. We already have a model for cities that has lasted for thousands of years. It works because it's based on human evolution. I have yet to see a model that deviates from this that is successful.
> You have to just keep adding supply but unfortunately the amount of living space that can be built in an urban area is constrained at some point both vertically and horizontally.
In cases like NYC/SFO I do think that's a problem. As you build more it actually has the unique phenomenon of becoming more expensive because you have to buy land, you have to build the building, and you have to attract tenants that can afford to pay for those things + your profit. And naturally you aren't going to lower rent on your existing places because that contradicts any reason to build new units. This isn't an absolute truth, but I think New York City proves the point. If you could just add supply to lower prices, New York would be much cheaper than, say, Columbus or Pittsburgh.
Agglomeration is important to our economy. Forcing people into Fordlandia does not work and trying to would destroy our ability to compete on the world stage.
Let's fix the low hanging fruit.
While that definitely works whenever doable, I'd say investing in much better infrastructure to reduce commuting time and complexity is the other big factor. Living far away from the workplace isn't a biggie if I can take for example a train and be there in a reasonable amount of time. For sure an expensive solution but a solution that will pay off nevertheless.
Dead Comment
"They added two more lanes to the freeway, but the traffic is worse than ever.” But that’s a wonderful result"
No, its not. Thoughput is a function of speed * vehicles. Having a 6 lane highway at a crawl is as effective as a single lane highway at decent speed. Induced demand is complicated to grasp but the core is that highways are terrible at moving lots of people and any additional highway will make more people drive to match the highway's new capacity. A neverending traffic loop. Trains, trams, buses and cyclepaths all move more people which should be prioritised. Many countries atleast have priority for buses which makes them a better option. Most american cities treat them like another car but with lower status.
If you build a 6 lane highway in Alaska, it's not going to get traffic. Induced demand is really supressed demand; people avoid trips because the cost in time is too high, increasing throughput allows more trips to be made at the same time cost, and so more trips are made.
But, if you look at Caltrans reports before and after highway widening, there's usually a decrease in the hours of congestion. At least until population growth overcomes the increased capacity. Mass transit can certainly move more people per vehicle and that can make more throughput, but it also limits the viable trips. If you loom at somewhere like the LA area, it's hard to live near where you work, especially if you have two workers in the household or you change jobs. Some routes have mass transit options, but a lot of commutes would take all day without a car; especially if the commute is at off hours.
Induced demand isn't actually a bad thing unless your transportation gets less efficient the more people use them. Which is definitely the case with cars. Just look at the amount of parking spaces needed to cope with peak hours. This can all be avoided if trains and buses are a viable and comfortable option for people.
Just think about the average car ridership only having 1.2 passengers. While a bus that takes up three parking spaces can have 50-100 people. Or a train that could hold up to 1500 passengers.
This holds true as long as the population is constant, becaus a single human can not spend an indefintly amount of time in public transport.
If the population can increase eg. Housing Markets in cities, this wont work. If you could double or quadruple the amount of available houses instantly the demand would also go up after some time…
You can pack a lot of buses onto a bus lane. Trains and trams scale even better because you can expand the same vehicle by adding more sections.
So yes, the widening of the highway makes the suburb more valuable, but the second effects make the city spend more resources on parking and makes the streets worse for anyone nearby. It's no picnic for the suburb either: A car-centric infrastructure basically bans anything else. That would be fine and all, if ultimately it produced more value than the alternatives. But look at the parking lots that were designed to never get completely full on black friday, back when it was actually a time where people did local shopping. Nowadays it's all wasted infrastructure, expensive to redevelop. If you thought that the commercial real estate office in dense cities was in trouble, don't look at the one in suburbs.
So it isn't really the highway, but all the things that relying on the highway leads to.
The problem is generally selling capacity expansion as "reducing congestion" when it does nothing of the sort. That, and the capacity gets used so quickly that you are very quickly spending yourself into a hole trying to build ever more highway capacity. The thing about a train is that it's very hard to make it so crowded the service degrades due to congestion, at least not within the first 20-50 years.
This black hole of money needed for highway congestion then starts pulling away from other municipal and transportation funding needs.
And, more than not being a problem, the highway filling up immediately is actually a benefit. Because more people are able and are choosing to travel, to accomplish whatever they need and want to accomplish.
Granted, the externality costs of all that car travel are high. But that's almost a separate issue and one that we really should be solving by a better accounting of costs and additional taxes. It's a shame that won't happen.
The alternative isn't eliminating those trips. It's taking the trillions of dollars we waste and spending it on an alternative, more efficient modes that deliver better outcomes (travel time, cost, speed, comfort, etc)
Urbanists tend to prefer walkable cities. They want to use less above-ground space for traffic and parking, leaving more space for buildings, parks, and public squares. Highway capacity expansions work against that, because they encourage more people to drive into the city.
* driving is just less healthy than walking, biking, or walking to and from public transport
* driving causes high noise pollution and emissions; EVs will solve the latter but not the former, since above low speeds most of the noise is tires rolling against roads
* increased driving in the US has led to higher fatality rates for the people still walking and biking
* increased driving leads to lower funding levels for other types of transport since road infrastructure is so expensive, and not everybody can afford a car to avoid getting left behind
I found this neat article https://millersamuel.com/change-is-constant-100-years-of-new...
In the 1910s when Manhattan's population was 2.3 million, price per square foot (PPSF) was $8. In the 2010s when the population was 1.6 million PPSF was $1070.
Inflation from the 1910s to the 2010s was about 22x. PPSF in Manhattan rose by 134x over the same time, even as the population fell.
Sure Manhattan is expensive but you can easily find a 2 bedroom in Jackson Heights for under $300k and still take the F train to work in the city. In the Bay Area that price point will have you on the freeway 4+ hours every day.
I agree with your overall point, but home prices are somewhat misleading in NYC. The "affordable" places tend to have lots of fees. That $300k 2b in Jackson Heights that's within walking distance to a subway line is probably going to have a $900 HOA.
No, I don't have an example of a reasonably priced detached single family home in NYC near a subway stop.
Nobody can make a controlled test to demonstrate millions of years of macro evolution, or to demonstrate the effects of housing policy on home prices. Smaller controlled tests or past observations are all explained away by countless confounders.
All that we’re left with is partisan bickering.
It’s up to you to decide whether your opinion on housing economics is like evolution or like intelligent design.
With the exception of 2021 and part of 2022 Austin has had plenty of inventory.
Texas A&M actually has really good research data on this: https://www.recenter.tamu.edu/data/housing-activity/#!/activ...
For context, I'm from Dallas. The same thing happened there. What were affordable apartments and starter homes went up in price as businesses consolidated there with high paid workers. The metroplex has worked to expand to all available land and yet they still struggle to make houses and apartments affordable.