[saosebastiao]

> Obviously something else is going on, density itself isn’t magic.

Of course it's not. You can have dense cheap cities (Tokyo, Chicago), dense expensive cities (Hong Kong, NYC), sprawled cheap cities (Houston, Indianapolis), and sprawled expensive cities (Palo Alto, Los Angeles). Density doesn't make a city cheap any more than it makes it expensive. Supply relative to demand does.

If you want a nearly perfect predictor of housing prices, don't look at density, look at the vacancy rate. The vacancy rate is probably the most direct way of measuring supply vs demand. If you have a high vacancy rate, you have a cheap city, and if you have a low vacancy rate, you have an expensive city.

The reason density is often touted as the solution is because increasing density is an increase in supply. It only moves the needle in one direction. Sprawl also moves the needle in that same direction. Cities with lots of space to move out have both options, and typically sprawl is cheaper. A city like Seattle or San Francisco doesn't have both options, so density is the only way to increase supply.