[seanhunter]

Yes exactly it is obvious. The article attempts to address this by saying this effect is not the full story, which seems highly unconvincing to me. His argument is stripped of density, Manhattan is just another island like lots of islands in Maine that didn’t end up having very expensive real estate. But firstly lots of islands (eg Martha’s Harbour, Long Island, which isn’t really an island but close enough) in the area are significantly less dense and have very expensive real estate so I don’t think that argument bears any scrutiny at all.

In general his thought experiments with data in the article just seem completely handwavy. “Imagine if I added 5x more houses to Oakland”. Well we can imagine that but we would likely be wrong about what would happen so it didn’t prove anything. Besides anything the most likely outcome would be you would have a lot of empty houses.

[ghaff]

Typically the building of housing and the use of land in fairly exclusive resort/beach/etc. communities is very tightly controlled. People in the Hamptons on the weekends don't want it to be another Manhattan. They already probably have a condo in Manhattan. Some real estate is desirable because of location (often beach/mountains) and community exclusivity--and often some degree of accessibility to wealthy population centers. (As you go up the Maine coast waterfront property is not necessarily outrageously expensive.)

[spacebanana7]

> But firstly lots of islands (eg Martha’s Harbour, Long Island, which isn’t really an island but close enough) in the area are significantly less dense and have very expensive real estate so I don’t think that argument bears any scrutiny at all.

This really depends on how you measure real estate prices. Long Island can have very low price per square foot of ground land compared to Manhattan, even if the unit price of housing or price per square foot of interior space is similar.