[cyberax]

We have a natural experiment: Minneapolis vs. Madison.

Minneapolis abolished the single-family zoning and parking requirements in 2018. And it worked, developers swarmed the city like vultures attracted to carrion.

Madison did no such nonsense.

Can you guess the impact of these policies on housing costs?

The house price growth in Minneapolis _accelerated_, just like in the nearby Madison. Here are the price growth charts: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1COwL

[germinalphrase]

FWIW: as a Minneapolis resident, my experience is that there is active hostility and grassroots rejection of adding dense housing in neighborhoods that are traditionally single family homes. I would be curious to see how much dense housing has actually been built post-2018 relative to the historical norm, as the small number of apartment buildings I've seen go up along light rail and buss corridors have fought tooth and nail against certain demographics in the neighborhoods.

[cyberax]

It'll get worse: https://minnesotareformer.com/2023/08/31/ending-minimum-park...

The usual misery pushers are already celebrating the win.

[brailsafe]

So... you want all new buildings to have parking minimums? First of all, pass, but secondly what about that article justifies your cynicism, and lastly what exactly is the root of your anger? Do you just love being isolated to the point that you think everyone else hates or should hate living somewhere where they don't need a car?

I'd be pretty annoyed about only being able to own something that had to have a dedicated parking space. What a waste.

[tacitusarc]

I defy the data [1].

There is too much complexity in that single example and the law of supply/demand has been proven too frequently for it to not make sense that increasing demand to meet supply would reduce cost.

1. For clarity, this phrasing is from here https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vrHRcEDMjZcx5Yfru/i-defy-the...

[cyberax]

> I defy the data.

Sorry. The reality doesn't care about your defiance.

Upzoning does not lead to lower housing prices. Even the most extreme urbanists admit that: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2023/4/26/upzoning-might...

> and the law of supply/demand has been proven too frequently

Ah, here it is. Have you considered that there, you know, might be "too much complexity" for "Economy 101" to fully explain the situation?

The _only_ way to decrease the housing prices is to BUILD MORE SUBURBS. Or even new cities entirely.

You don't have any other options. Sorry again.

Well, maybe one more: the Detroit route. Reduce the city population and the prices will go down.

[tacitusarc]

Firstly, your link is focused on zoning changes, specifically how they are insufficient to prompt addition supply to be built.

From your linked blog post:

> Freemark finds extremely mixed and uncertain evidence for the effects of upzoning, and one of several reasons he identifies is that the link between upzoning and actual housing production is tenuous. In other words, “Are they allowed to build it?” is a different question from, “Are they building it?”

Secondly, building more suburbs and more cities increases the supply… which indicates agreement that the price problem is one of insufficient supply.

EDIT: To be perfectly clear, the data I disagree with is that increasing supply in Minneapolis failed to impact price. This is the contention of the comment I responded to, and it is fundamentally different from the claim that zoning changes fail to increase supply.

[cyberax]

> Firstly, your link is focused on zoning changes, specifically how they are insufficient to prompt addition supply to be built.

Yeah. The misery pushers (urbanists) can't admit outright that their ideology is leading to disaster, can they? So they now need not only zoning restrictions lifted, but the state must also build housing and give it out to "deserving" people for cheap.

> Secondly, building more suburbs and more cities increases the supply… which indicates agreement that the price problem is one of insufficient supply.

I'm not arguing against supply-and-demand in general (I'm not a communist idiot). I'm arguing against the _density_ increases.

> EDIT: To be perfectly clear, the data I disagree with is that increasing supply in Minneapolis failed to impact price.

But it did. The real estate transaction index clearly shows that there were no positive effects from the new construction.

Moreover, I analyzed all the real estate sales in the US, Canada, and parts of Europe since 1995. I have not found a single example of a large (>100k population) city that decreased the housing sale prices by increasing density.

Even during the crash of 2007, the dense housing crashed less than comparative nearby sparse housing.

The scholarly literature is also unambiguous. The best effects of density increases are either mild (transient effects on rent), or indirect (migration chains).

[brailsafe]

You keep referring to people who like cities that function as cities as "misery pushers" and then in the same breath doing as much as you can to create an association between increased density and all these hypothetical negative possibilities. Likewise it just seems as though you've developed some level of prejudice based on the negative experience you're contending with in your neighborhood, and then extrapolating that quite severely, because you think you've been lied to. It's tricky to reconcile how if you were inclined to be optimistic about the prospect of urbanism to begin with, you'd be so intensely and easily convinced otherwise, or surprised that the creation of an arbitrary higher density building didn't turn your low density town into European capital city overnight. Like how does it happen that you lived in no specific place in Europe for example, then to where you are now, and one thing gets built which convinces you that actually every city in Europe is and has always been wrong.

Your chart shows two lines that seem to represent sales of something over time in nearby cities, which may or may not be relevant, but are at most a narrow slice of what one would need to look at in order to understand what's going on over in Minneapolis if anything.

You then create a strawman who thinks the removal of zoning restrictions will automatically lead to a utopia in which we have no other human problems or economic systems to contend with, even going so far as to dismiss someone on the basis of a lacking argument against a claim that nobody made.

[cyberax]

> You keep referring to people who like cities that function as cities as "misery pushers"

That's an apt description.

> in the same breath doing as much as you can to create an association between increased density and all these hypothetical negative possibilities.

Why are they hypothetical? Density has long been associated with worse outcomes (higher crime, etc.). I can provide plenty of citations to scholarly literature.

> Like how does it happen that you lived in no specific place in Europe for example, then to where you are now

I grew up in Russia (Izhevsk), moved to Germany (Karlsruhe), then to Ukraine (Kyiv), and (briefly) to the Netherlands before coming to the US. I did not have a car in any of these places.

> and one thing gets built which convinces you that actually every city in Europe is and has always been wrong.

Yes. I'm able to compare the life in the US and in Europe first-hand. And Europe has plenty of dark secrets of its own. For example, Copenhagen in Denmark became the world's most liveable city by ruthlessly controlling its population. It still has not reached its peak number in 1970-s. Bet you didn't know that?

> Your chart shows two lines that seem to represent sales of something over time in nearby cities, which may or may not be relevant, but are at most a narrow slice of what one would need to look at in order to understand what's going on over in Minneapolis if anything.

I have real estate data with street-level information. It's not a public dataset, so I'm replicating my results using public datasets.

> You then create a strawman who thinks the removal of zoning restrictions will automatically lead to a utopia

No. I'm saying that removal of zoning limits to allow increased density does NOT lead to lower prices. It leads to increased density and increased misery as a result.

Minneapolis is simply a good example of this. There is another very good one: Seattle (where I live now). It increased its density by 25% over the last 12 years, many times leading the nation in the number of active construction cranes. The result? Faster price growth than even in SF.

[verall]

What about Austin, where they have aggressively upzoned and built, and now housing prices are down?

[cyberax]

Austin is an interesting case. It tripped me up a bit when I saw it.

But it turned out that my prediction was correct because the Austin population went _down_ during the pandemic.

Population:

2019 - 978,763

2022 - 975,418

2023 - 979,882

The overall Travis County population went up a bit. And the prices, in the places other than Austin, are also up.

I can also give a prediction, if Austin population growth recovers (not a given), the price growth rate will quickly outpace the surrounding Travis County.

[verall]

Looking at the population of Austin proper is pretty silly here, and similar just looking at Travis. The city proper lost population from 2019-2020 as many cities did during the early pandemic, but grew each year since. The Austin metro area has grown every one of these years.

In every comparable city in the country, housing prices are up. In Austin, they are down.

[cyberax]

> In every comparable city in the country, housing prices are up. In Austin, they are down.

Now compare the population. Travis County population (sans Austin) went up, so the prices are also up. And Travis County actually has _more_ new units than Austin proper.

The driver for the price decreases in Austin is the population drop, not the new construction.

[tiahura]

The _only_ way to decrease the housing prices is to BUILD MORE SUBURBS. Or even new cities entirely.

Preach brother. Might I also add the possibility of encouraging migration from Metropolises to regional 100k - 200kish cities?

[cyberax]

Yup. It's pretty much the only way to fix the housing crisis.

I think that 300k is the threshold for a good city size.

[tacitusarc]

*increasing supply to meet demand

[waveBidder]

Those abolishments are way less intense than you're thinking. There's still a ton of restrictions that make building even the triplexes that they technically legalized actually get built. Things like floor/area ratios and setbacks, which make building dwellings that people want difficult.

https://streets.mn/2023/10/24/mapping-minneapolis-duplexes-a...

[cyberax]

The abolishments actually fundamentally changed Minneapolis: https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/articles/...

Most of the new units are in massive multi-apartment buildings. And these buildings have a huge disproportionate impact on the quality of life.

It's now going to be sliding into shittier and shittier conditions. More crime, more congestion, higher housing prices.

[germinalphrase]

You live near one of these developments? Your reaction may be correct, but my experience has been that the density has brought amenities. A brewery, a cafe, and a good restaurant moved into vacant/underutilized spaces. My street hasn’t been had issues with long-term parkers. Crime’s no issue. IDK. My experience doesn’t align with your certainty.

[cyberax]

I actually do live in a neighborhood affected by densification, although not in Minneapolis. The "amenities" got worse, a couple of local small stores were demolished and replaced with apartment buildings. A couple of these apartment buildings are "low barrier housing", meaning that they are given to junkies. So the property crime in the area skyrocketed (not helped by newly opened transit), and we don't have a single 24-hour pharmacy in the area anymore.

The street parking is now oversubscribed, so my friends often have to circle around the area for quite a while to find a spot when they visit me.

These changes actually made me look into the question of density. Before that first-hand experience, I used to be a pro-urbanist victim of propaganda. And yes, I lived in Europe and I got my driving license when I was about 30.

[germinalphrase]

That’s unfortunate. Maybe it can be done well or be done poorly. From my experience as a homeowner in Minneapolis, the dense housing has been net neutral/positive.

[waveBidder]

I don't think you read and understood the article you just linked. That is talking about a very broad set of reforms, not the single family home zoning abolishment.

> higher housing prices

Have you ever heard of a market?