[cyberax]

The answer is "no".

That's because WE DO NOT HAVE a housing crisis. And yes, I'm not crazy.

We have 1.1 housing units per family right _now_. We likely will have the record number of housing units per capita within about 2 years just due to the current pipeline of new housing. These numbers are easy to verify.

Why are we talking about housing then? That's because we have a JOBS crisis. The only available good jobs are concentrated in a dwindling number of dense areas. And making it easier to build makes the jobs crisis even worse.

Don't believe me? Look at Vancouver, BC. They did everything: automated transit, soul-crushingly depressive high rises near transit stations, (de-fact) prohibited foreign ownership of housing, streamlined permitting.

Guess what happened? If your guess is "plentiful cheap housing" then make another guess.

[cman1444]

This is the first time I've heard of this locational jobs crisis. Where did you learn about this? I would like to read more about it

[cyberax]

There is not a lot of good literature, actually.

I'm not saying anything even remotely factually controversial. Housing units per household: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=15tRv

It's also not controversial that major job density increases are happening in a few select metros: https://www.route-fifty.com/workforce/2019/06/job-density-re... or if you look more broadly, that smaller cities in the US are dying out.

I simply arrived at a different conclusion: we don't need to continue deepening this death spiral by "building more".

[cman1444]

That st louis fed link doesn't seem to show any clear trend to me. Looks like we're actually on a downturn after a peak.

Regardless, I don't understand what your proposed solution to this supposed "jobs crisis" is.

[cyberax]

It's a bit misleading because the Y axis is not starting at 0.

> Regardless, I don't understand what your proposed solution to this supposed "jobs crisis" is.

Tax the dense office space, or do cap&trade. Incentivize remote work. Treat commute time as work time. Prohibit dense housing except in special cases (university campuses, military bases, senior living, etc.). Promote and subsidize self-driving cars.

[JumpCrisscross]

> making it easier to build makes the jobs crisis even worse

Why?

[cyberax]

It creates for companies more incentives to move to these areas, as they have easier access to a larger talent pool. Which in turn makes housing there even more expensive.

[JumpCrisscross]

You’re describing clusters of productivity and economies of scale. It sounds like your solution to the housing crisis is people should be poorer?

[cyberax]

This is not "economy of scale", this is more of a "pollution death spiral" and "unpriced externalities".

A factory that dumps raw waste into rivers is more efficient and can produce widgets more cheaply than a factory that takes care to clean up the waste.

A firm in a dense city core can get talent more easily, and it'll have advantage (on average, in the long run) over a firm that has a fully remote workforce. The negative externalities (living in poor conditions in an expensive city) are offloaded onto the workers. E.g. the housing square footage keeps decreasing: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/charted-the-growing-gap-bet...

[JumpCrisscross]

> negative externalities (living in poor conditions in an expensive city) are offloaded onto the workers

Cities are more efficient in practically every way than subsidized rural developments. It’s really weird to flip that around as an externality. (Disclaimer: I moved from New York to Wyoming. Thanks for your subsidies, I guess.)

There absolutely are jobs in remote places. But the people there aren’t as valuable as someone who will bump into like-minded colleagues and cultural expression as part of their existence in a cluster.

[cyberax]

> Cities are more efficient in practically every way than subsidized rural developments

No, they're not. It's the other way around, in fact. Suburbs subsidize cities (on average, again).

The dense city cores produce most of the _corporate_ income tax, because that's where the companies are headquartered. But most of _personal_ income tax comes from suburbs. This is only now getting close to flipping around.

Cities also have YUUUUGE expenses that simply don't happen in sparse areas. E.g. infrastructure like water or sewer is wildly expensive in cities because of the planning overhead. Case in point: San Francisco spent almost half a billion rebuilding a few blocks of road.

Cities also require EXPENSIVE public transit. One ride on a bus/subway in the US costs around $20. I'm talking about the true cost (number of trips / total expenses), not the farebox cost. And with capex it's almost incalculable, with crazy numbers like $50 per ride for Seattle.

The TLDR; version:

1. Infrastructure in suburbs might end up being a bit more expensive on a per-capita basis. Or it might not, depending on the way you do accounting.

2. In any case, this difference is not at all significant.

3. Suburbs are _not_ subsidized, and in fact generate most of the wealth in the US.

[cman1444]

That article has cherrypicked dates.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/COMPSFLAM1FQ

Also, firm in a dense city can get better talent, but those negative externalities (and I would argue these externalities are not clearly caused by the mployer) are made up for through increased salaries the firm must pay compared to areas with lower living costs.

[cyberax]

Care to explain the cherry-picking? The average square footage was growing steadily (except for the 2008 crisis) and the inflection point happened around 2012 when the death spiral started in earnest.

It has been on the downward trend since then.

> Also, firm in a dense city can get better talent, but those negative externalities (and I would argue these externalities are not clearly caused by the mployer) are made up for through increased salaries the firm must pay compared to areas with lower living costs.

Except that the increased salary does NOT compensate for the increased cost of living. And firms absolutely don't pay for their impact on infrastructure.

My favorite example: Seattle. Each household will end up paying around $150k in additional taxes for the new transit that will benefit primarily dense office holders in the downtown.