Housing in the US is freakingly cheap. You can buy a house that would be an envy of half of the people in Europe for $200k. The problem is, it won't be anywhere near "trendy" locations.
And that's the _real_ problem. People are forced by market forces to move into ever denser cities.
And increasing density ALWAYS results in cost increases. It's like the rocket equation: dense cities need infrastructure to support infrastructure to support infrastructure.
And no, none of the inane solutions: "let's legalize SROs^W microapartments!" or "let's just force each homeowner to take a family to live with them!" will do anything with that. They'll just increase the overall misery.
> The problem is, it won't be anywhere near "trendy" locations.
You are being very reductive and writing out entire categories of reasons why housing is unsustainably expensive. In your next two sentences:
> People are forced by market forces to move into ever denser cities.
Lots of us already live in cities but our neighbors and elected leaders have let this get massively out of hand. I have lived in Seattle my entire life, as has my wife, and we raised kids here. One of them has had to move away because they can't afford housing here and the other has moved to Marysville just to be able to afford something.
My wife and I are both getting older and didn't want to climb stairs to be able to get to our front door (Seattle, as you may recall, has a lot of hills). Even though we had nominal equity in our house, the red hot housing market here means that equity didn't go as far because we wanted to stay in the same region to be near family and friends we've had our entire life.
Never mind that a lot of those "trendy" areas are where jobs and cultural activities are. Housing is "cheap" in the US if you follow the "just live in the middle of nowhere" model, which of course lots of people don't want or are unable to do.
> Lots of us already live in cities but our neighbors and elected leaders have let this get massively out of hand. I have lived in Seattle my entire life, as has my wife, and we raised kids here. One of them has had to move away because they can't afford housing here and the other has moved to Marysville just to be able to afford something.
A quick check. Can you tell me how many new units Seattle has created within the last ~12 years in percentage of the total?
> Never mind that a lot of those "trendy" areas are where jobs and cultural activities are.
"Cultural activities" that are specific for large cities for the vast majority of people consist of going to a game maybe once a year.
It's not that it won't be near "trendy". It's that it won't be near jobs. Look at median salary and workforce participation in places where houses cost $200k. Your affordability calculation will be re-calibrated.
Density is not a problem, it is a solution. Denser means more developed, more environmentally friendly, more productive, higher earning, more efficient. Increasing density increases wealth (pay a little, gain a lot). It almost always increases wealth faster than costs.
The issue right now is that we are not allowed to build dense cities. We are not allowed to build single bedroom apartments where young, single workers need them to live next to new, productive jobs. We can only build single family homes and even then only at the periphery of huge cities. Massive swathes of downtowns are parking, highways, and single family houses -- when those should have been demolished and replaced with transit and dense towers long ago.
The market is screaming for the opportunity to build us dense housing. All we have to do is grant it.
Quite simply, it's not. Densification leads to cost increases. And "more developed"? LOL.
I have analyzed the database of all real estate sales in the US for the last 25 years, and I have not found a single example where densification of a city led to lower prices. Not a single one.
> The issue right now is that we are not allowed to build dense cities
> The market is screaming for the opportunity to build us dense housing. All we have to do is grant it.
Sorry. But you're spewing a bunch of horseshit.
Some forms of densification are allowed pretty much everywhere. It has not led to lower prices even once.
Of course the cost goes up. Densification does not lead to lower prices, because it increases wealth. People in denser areas make more money, because businesses in denser areas are more productive, because density is efficient and causes people to be more productive.
This is a good thing.
Affordability is not cost. The problem that we have now is that supply of housing is artificially constrained by bad policy, which allows some groups to capture the surplus. It is broadly not a coincidence that the groups that capture the surplus are the very same that set policy.
It seems to me that "some forms of densification are allowed pretty much everywhere" is doing a lot of work for you. Can you elaborate? How easy is it to build an apartment building "anywhere?" [1] is an example of what I mean, but you can google "housing supply shortage USA" if you want general statistics. The conclusion is pretty much unanimous: it is immensely difficult to build anything, anywhere, which has caused a massive shortage in the supply of housing. Again: density, solution.
If we allow buildings to be built, a developer will gladly come in and build buildings. Someone building a house for someone else to live in is, in general, a very good thing. Everyone participating in this conversation lives in a house that someone else built for them and made a profit in so doing, and it's a good thing, because that allows us to work and create value.
If that were true, then people in big dense urban areas would be paying less share of their income than in other areas. But I don’t think that’s true at all, at least for those making at or below the median.
Dense cities are more desirable to live in, but that induces more demand, so even though the cities generate more wealth, the equilibrium between supply and demand still skews to people wanting to pay more of their income to bid on a limited supply of housing (even if that supply is larger, more demand is simply induced). We should allow more building (and denser building) in popular cities, but we shouldn’t do that blindly thinking that it would somehow make housing more affordable.
You can google housing supply shortage for basically any country with a good economy, not just the USA. The only way to get around it is somehow suppress demand (low paying jobs in Berlin 20 years ago, or a declining population in Japan).
We were all hoping to be able to move out of inner cities to more affordable areas, but then corporations and even government banned telecommuting because it hurt commercial real estate's bottom line.
You want to discuss home affordability, WFH has to be a pillar of that discussion. We came within an inch of being able to populate a substantially larger previously non-commutable area of the US, and then it was pulled back.
> You can buy a house that would be an envy of half of the people in Europe for $200k. The problem is, it won't be anywhere near "trendy" locations.
It’s not been my experience that the lion share of Europeans envy Americans and certainly not Americans who live outside big cities. And I work with Europeans every day in my job.
Housing in the US is freakingly cheap. You can buy a house that would be an envy of half of the people in Europe for $200k. The problem is, it won't be anywhere near "trendy" locations.
And that's the _real_ problem. People are forced by market forces to move into ever denser cities.
And increasing density ALWAYS results in cost increases. It's like the rocket equation: dense cities need infrastructure to support infrastructure to support infrastructure.
And no, none of the inane solutions: "let's legalize SROs^W microapartments!" or "let's just force each homeowner to take a family to live with them!" will do anything with that. They'll just increase the overall misery.