[Dylan16807]

> the city won’t become more affordable (long term) until it stops attracting new residents

I really hope we don't have indefinite large amounts of US population growth. And if we mostly stabilize the population, then it only takes a few 16M cities to absorb all the demand and make the relief permanent.

> Paris is a good example, I think, of a city expensive by French standards. My point was that if your theory is you can build to affordable, there should be at least one example on the planet where that actually worked (even Tokyo is considered expensive by Japanese standards).

Then consider this particular argument not that you can build to a nebulously defined "affordable", but that you can build to "San Diego has between 100% and 1000% of its current population with rent 40% lower than it is right now".

[seanmcdirmid]

> I really hope we don't have indefinite large amounts of US population growth.

You don't need indefinite growth. People generally want to live in a few cities; e.g. they don't really want to live in Toledo, they want to live in San Deigo. So you just have to let people live where they want to live, not where they have to lvie.

> Then consider this particular argument not that you can build to a nebulously defined "affordable", but that you can build to "San Diego has between 100% and 1000% of its current population with rent 40% lower than it is right now".

That has literally never happened before and I don't see how it will happen first in San Diego. Mega cities get more expensive, not cheaper, as they grow, since the concentration of human capital and jobs make it even more valuable to live there.

[Dylan16807]

I'll put it this way. If 10-20 popular cities try to outbuild their population growth with a cap of 16 million people each, at least some of them will succeed. Three quarters of the US population isn't going to move into 10-20 cities.

The only way that general idea fails is if the demand concentrates so strongly into a couple megacities that we don't even have 10-20 non-obsolete cities left. That seems unlikely to me.