I recently read a highly publicized pro-NIMBY book, Vanishing New York. The author, who goes by the pen name "Jeremiah Moss" tells a simple story: throughout New York, gentrification and chain stores are on the march, making the city rich and boring. The story has an element of truth: obviously, … [Read more...]
High Rents: Are Construction Costs the Culprit?
(cross-posted from planetizen.com)I have argued numerous times on Planetizen that increased housing supply would reduce rents. I recently read one counterargument that I had not fully addressed before: the claim that no amount of new housing will ever bring down urban rents because housing in … [Read more...]
Does Density Raise Housing Prices?
My last post, on urban geographic constraints and housing prices, led to an interesting discussion thread. The most common counterargument was that because dense cities are usually more expensive, density must cause high cost. But if this was true, cities would become cheaper as they became less … [Read more...]
The “Geographically Constrained Cities” Fantasy
One common argument against building new urban housing is that cities are geographically constrained by their natural and political boundaries, and thus can never build enough housing to bring prices down. This claim rests on a variety of false assumptions.The first false assumption is that the … [Read more...]
NIMBY Contradictions
Ever since zoning was invented in the 1920s, homeowners have argued that limits on density and on multifamily housing are necessary to protect property values. But today, urban NIMBYs seek to prevent new housing on the ground that new housing will lead to gentrification, which will in turn lead to … [Read more...]
(Not So) Infinite Demand
In a recent blog post, Julia Galef has generated a fairly comprehensive list of pro-housing arguments and counterarguments to those arguments.She gives the most detailed consideration to the "infinite demand" argument- in her words,“So even if SF adds a lot of additional housing, prices will … [Read more...]
Empty Houses, part 2
The most interesting comment to my last post focused on one narrow issue: to what extent are vacant housing units second homes (and thus presumably less likely to be rented out) as opposed to units for rent/sale or held for other unknown reasons?Why does this matter? Because one might argue … [Read more...]
The “Empty House” Theory
One common argument against new urban housing runs as follows: "If we build new housing, it will all be bought up by rich investors who will sit on it. So new supply doesn't restrain housing costs." This argument (at least as I have phrased it) strikes me as absurd. Here's why: for the argument … [Read more...]