[rayiner]

It’s a curse even for the urban center itself. How many middle class people who grew up in London (or San Francisco or New York City) can afford to buy a house and raise their kids there?

Mid-sized cities with stable local industries are much better for the average person. We have no tech, banking, etc., in Annapolis where I live. We have the Navy, farming, and tourism. The city is full of people who grew up here. Low level retail jobs are staffed by teenagers, not immigrants or some other underclass. Housing is affordable. Similarly in adds Moines Iowa. The unemployment rate is 2.7%. The average house price is less than 4x the median household income, compared to over 10x in San Francisco.

[tptacek]

We could fix the housing price problem pretty quickly, if we wanted to.

[rayiner]

How easily could it be, considering that “large productive cities” all over the world—in diverse political and cultural contexts—are suffering from this same problem?

[tptacek]

They suffer from it to different extents. We have in fact a pretty clear idea of what the problem is: artificially constricted supply.

[rayiner]

Surly demand (and lots of wealth sloshing around for the top 10%) is part of the problem too. The DC/NOVA area had pretty reasonable housing prices 20-30 years ago. It seems like they’ve been building housing pretty aggressively in that area. But prices used to be capped by what a GS-scale worker could afford. Now those same folks are competing with Google engineers and kids of rich foreigners.

[tptacek]

You could read an Yglesias post, or 1,000, talking about how effectively DC is confronting artificial housing scarcity.

[rayiner]

I subscribe to his substack. As far as I know, Virginia is allowing lots of housing development.