| What I've seen in many big cities happening with regularity: 1. City has a good mojo, not too big, not too small. 2. Not too unequal neighborhoods. 3. #1 and #2 attract startups, big companies. 4. Rents rise in the city. 5. Slowly there will be calls to increase housing density. 6. More houses get built, housing density increases, rents go down by $100-$200/month for maybe 1-2 years. 7. Rents bounce back in about 1-2 years and then continue on. 8. Calls to increase density further, eventually the city loses its desirable properties and poor people are still relatvely just as worse off as they were before. 9. The rich tech worker is still in the same position, relatively. Important thing being, even after doing all these things, the median poor person in the name of which all this densification happened is still stuck in the same relative bad standing as he/she was before, only difference being the city lost its charm in the process as well. Obviously, this doesn't apply in the case of NYC since it's been a big city for a long long time but the above story is worth keeping in mind for small cities in many states. It might be a better idea to have companies distributed more uniformly than pushing for high densification of few cities. It spreads economic benefits around as well. |