[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.

[brailsafe]

> 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.

I never made that claim.

> It's not a public dataset, so I'm replicating my results using public datasets.

You'll need to do better than just comparing real estate sales. If you're going to make a coherent argument based on data, it should at least attempt to show the relationship between more datapoints than just arbitrary sales and time, especially with only a 6 year timespan. Whether there's something there or not, you're not providing a substantial enough analysis to be compelling here.

It's fine if you don't like denser areas. Plenty of people who grow up in denser cities move out because they feel like they're sick of people, but cities wouldn't be cities if they're wasn't a reason to be there, and many people prefer it. There's not a chance in hell I'd move back to a car dependent hellscape, because I grew up in one, and that's true misery to me.

> 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.

Again, weird cherry-picked comparison that wouldn't surprise anyone who's aware of the two tech hubs.