[majormajor]

Manhattan is hardly affordable. Development alone is hardly an answer for affordability. Most development projects in the US are designed to increase growth and demand, not to decrease price. Increased growth and demand actively work against affordability, so if your development is contributing to increased demand as much as it is to supply, it's not helping.

It's like how building wider freeways doesn't solve traffic. Demand is not independent of what has been built.

[wahern]

Induced demand is predicated on the consumer not having to internalize the costs, which is the case for the poster child of induced demand--non-toll, public freeways.

The problem in the Bay Area isn't induced demand, almost by definition. Rather, the demand already exists, and that's precisely why costs keep skyrocketing despite very low supply growth. The only way out of the situation other than by increasing supply is to cut demand to live there by, e.g., bombing tech headquarters and unleashing roving bands of human culling robots so that people would have less motivation to move here.

An example of actual induced demand in the Bay Area might be homeless housing in San Francisco. Since circa 2005 SF has built enough units of homeless housing to house every homeless person enumerated in the circa 2005 homeless census. But the number of homeless on the street has stayed the same--which is to say, the total number of homeless has approximately doubled since that time, w/ half now living in city-built housing. Arguably this suggests that there may be something like a set carrying capacity of unsheltered homeless in the city, and no matter how many units of housing you provide, you'll always have that number of homeless on the streets.[1] Though, this is obviously just a conjecture. People argue vociferously about the origins and motivations of the homeless in SF. I certainly won't claim to have any concrete answers. But at least such a conjectured phenomenon would be consonant w/ the theory of induced demand.

[1] To be clear, the induced demand in this scenario is demand for the free housing units, not spots on the sidewalk.

[majormajor]

> Rather, the demand already exists, and that's precisely why costs keep skyrocketing despite very low supply growth.

If the costs are skyrocketing doesn't that mean demand has been going up, not that it already existed at these levels?

How many more tech offices are in SF now than fifteen years ago? Has the city's commercial growth policies been considering in sync with their residential growth policies? Or have they let the one fan the flames of the other? They should've preemptively bombed the tech headquarters, to tweak your suggestion. ;)

But my money says that even if they had unleashed a bunch more residential construction fifteen years ago, it would've only been accompanied by even more business and commercial growth. Coastal hub cities have a fundamental demand aspect with how cheap cross-country (or even global) travel is these days - there is a lot of built-in appeal that's going to attract people there, even if only for second homes or investment housing, etc, and keep a lot of pressure on the price floor.

[wahern]

I'm sure demand has also been going up, though I don't know how to disentangle that from inflationary effects--same number of people wanting to live here, but w/ access to more wealth. In any event, it only drives home the point that the relationship between demand, supply, and price isn't something you can just will away, like an alternate universe Jane Jacobs applying Marxist economics.

AFAIU, San Francisco has built more market and non-market housing than any other city in the Bay Area, despite being geographically quite small. Unfortunately, that's a relatively low bar in the context of the Bay Area considering so many cities just refuse to up-zone anything, or approve projects in up-zoned areas.

[olliej]

I disagree here as I've seen numerous examples of autonomous robots blocking sidewalks and crossings such that people with disabilities are unable to pass. Also who gets to win the contract? Are they using locally made small batch robots? If not, why not?

Have we consider the use of organic cullers instead?

[wisty]

You're talking about "induced demand". Induced demand is not so high for housing. I might decide to drive 15 minutes to get a hotdog from Costco is the traffic isn't too awful. I probably won't buy an extra house just because it looks like a better deal than before. It does exist to some extent, but it's nowhere near as big a deal as for roads (at least in the short-medium term), at least I think that's the currently thinking on it - https://appam.confex.com/appam/2018/webprogram/Paper25811.ht...

[majormajor]

It's not induced demand through increased housing stock, it's city development that becomes a cycle of residential/commercial/business development (or all-in-one mixed development), all of which have feedback loops into each other.

Simply going for growth-at-all-costs gets you a more crowded but still expensive city. That may be better for the people running the cities and their budgets, but it's not clear to me it's better for anyone else than having things spread out to more places across the state or country.

[kelp]

Sprawl is probably worse for the environment overall. More driving, more land taken over. More density also reduces that.

[moultano]

NYC has one of the lowest rates of housing starts per capita in the US.

[majormajor]

So density alone is not the answer, only ever-increasing density would be?

That seems an insanely dystopian outcome.

[akvadrako]

I think it's been tried and what you get is Tokyo. I wouldn't say dystopian but it's also one of the most expensive cities in the world. Apparently the average apartment is about $2000/month.

[pochamago]

That's the average price for a two bedroom apartment. You can easily find much cheaper options, the average one room apartment in Adachi ward is nearly a quarter of that.

Edit: Just for comparison, the average two bedroom in San Francisco is $3500, and that's down $1000 from last year

[imtringued]

Tokyo is very big. If the only apartments you can find are that expensive then you either want to live in a certain ward or you aren't looking hard enough.

[akvadrako]

I said it's the average price, obviously about half are cheaper.

[moultano]

If the price will bear it that means people want to live there more than elsewhere. Don't impose your idea of dystopia on other people.