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by bryanlarsen 3649 days ago
Building more McMansions makes McMansions cheaper, which means the upper middle class moves out of their mid-scale housing and into McMansions, making mid-scale housing more affordable.

Regulations shouldn't be about affordability, they should be about density.
2 comments
untog 3649 days ago
But they still take up a lot more space. And that matters. Jobs are still usually centered on a specific area, the further you move from that area the less convenient it is to live there and travel to work. That's how we ended up with the suburbs in the first place.

> Regulations shouldn't be about affordability, they should be about density.

That's essentially a different label for the same thing. Affordable housing is dense housing.

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VLM 3649 days ago
> Affordable housing is dense housing.

In constrained cities. In the linked article there's a pix of the dead walmart in Beaver Dam Wisconsin. I've visited family there, in fact I stayed at the hotel across the street from the dead walmart. It was part of a dead mall, I think. The relevance of this is the new, larger supercenter is literally across the street from a corn farm. Not an isolated farm either.

If your job, perhaps being a retired grandmother, does not require living in the center of silicon valley, then its a VERY nice place to live with tons of outdoor recreation.

Affordable usually implies much lower income, and lower income implies less geographic constraint. The "centeredness" of the job you mention depends incredibly strongly on job title and pay rate. The legendary extreme centeredness of startup jobs is very important to startups, but the other 300+ million citizens live a much less centered life.

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st3v3r 3649 days ago
Not really. Silicon Valley still needs 7-11 clerks, fast food workers, social workers, and other lower paying jobs.
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jessaustin 3649 days ago
That's a problem for Silicon Valley, not for Beaver Dam, WI.
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bryanlarsen 3649 days ago
"That's essentially a different label for the same thing. Affordable housing is dense housing."

In cities, affordable housing is almost always dense. It doesn't apply in the other direction, though. Dense housing isn't necessarily affordable.

But, building more dense housing increases the supply of affordable housing almost 1:1, even if the new dense housing isn't affordable.

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st3v3r 3649 days ago
Trickle down economics doesn't work.
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