

Why Middle-Class Americans Can't Afford to Live in Liberal Cities - testrun
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/10/why-are-liberal-cities-so-unaffordable/382045/

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geebee
This was an interesting article. However, one thing that wasn't discussed is
the correlation between existing population density and resistance to new
construction. San Francisco is notoriously opposed to new construction, but it
does have relatively high population density by US standards. I'm not saying
that this means the opposition to new construction is justified, but I do
think we might want to investigate the possibility that population density may
play a bigger role than political liberalism.

This could be a difficult one to tease out, mainly because there aren't all
that many highly dense areas that lean heavily conservative in the the US. New
York, Boston, San Francisco, Washington, Seattle… they're pretty much all
liberal cities (as measured by percentage voting for Obama vs Romney).

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api
Good economy, affordable housing, NIMBYism: pick two.

Liberal cities tend to be NIMBY cities -- there's a lot of zoning, an anti-
development mindset among many, and other restrictions on new construction.

These cities also tend to have good economies and high incomes.

Constrained supply + increasing demand = exploding price. It's pretty simple.

Note the outlier: Orange County. It's got high income and is conservative (by
California standards), but it has a sort of peculiar NIMBYism of its own. A
lot of people in OC are opposed to "high density housing," and many of its
neighborhoods are very planned with newer and higher density construction
restricted. OC is the exception that proves the rule.

