[wanoir]

One thing that can’t be scaled is “prime location”

There will be locations that are more desirable than others, and even if you keep building houses where there’s space, the need to congregate in particular areas (such as for work) will result in particular locations being more desirable.

And, it’s hard to increase the density of an area once the housing supply is already built out.

So instead, that supply stays fixed, demand increases, and the price increases in turn.

This actually made me think then that an accelerator for scalability could be: public transit into population centers that ensure areas with abundant space (and cheaper housing supply) can still easily access the areas that would otherwise be hugely expensive to live near

I believe this was done near DC where the public transit buildout helped foster further housing development in those emerging areas. Not sure if other HCOL areas, e.g. CA Bay Area, have similar things going on for East Bay mobility / other cross-county transport

[crabmusket]

I've been thinking about this a lot. It feels to me like we* are not good at making new places that people want to be, so we spend a lot of energy working out how to maximally utilise the existing good places.

There will of course be some places that are uniquely popular e.g. due to their geography or natural beauty. Humans tend to congregate around centres of economic activity, which means some places become popular. But creating sprawls of dormitory suburbs and efficiently piping everybody into the few places that are actually nice sounds terrible.

* my perspective from Australia

[JumpCrisscross]

> we are not good at making new places that people want to be

Isn’t this every boom town or place complaining about their quaint community blowing up?

[crabmusket]

I'm not sure I follow entirely.

If you're responding to an implication that people should go have their own nice place elsewhere and not bother me in my nice place... yeah, I can understand why that's problematic. But I don't think the position "we should build more nice places" is itself a wrong position to take.

[JumpCrisscross]

I’m saying every time a quiet town’s housing market booms, that is peoples’ preferences around where they want to live shifting.

[physPop]

China does it and it works well. We just need governments with executive planning capabilities. In my country (Canada) we only have myopic politicians who only care for re-election.

[fragmede]

In the US, in California, some billionaires tried to create a new city, but it got shot down, because billionaires.

[rickydroll]

> we are not good at making new places that people want to be

I think it's more appropriate to say that we don't have enough diversity of places to meet the population's wide-ranging desires and needs. There are city mice that love the density, crowds, and noise of urban environments, and there are country mice who take refuge in quieter country spaces. It's a disaster when housing misallocation forces one to live in another's space.

Case in point. A friend lived in a suburban rural community because it had dark skies and he loved astronomy. It was great until some neighbors moved into an adjacent house, and they immediately put up floodlights all around the house and left them on all the time. They resisted turning them off when he asked.

These people should have been living in a city condo tower where they would feel "safe." The question then becomes, why didn't they buy in the city? They clearly had the money given the size of the property and the city it was located in. I suspect the answer was an insufficient number of urban condos.

I love having gardens, fruit trees, and birds at the feeder. That is an existence I chose. I want people to be able to choose a different living option if they want it.

I don't have an answer for how to solve the housing problem. I hope that whatever plans people use, they keep urban-scale density inside the city limits and not export it to the countryside. And while they're at it, turn down the fucking lights. Your light bubble damages crepuscular and nocturnal life cycles in animals and plants within a 20-plus-mile radius.

[_carbyau_]

> we* are not good at making new places that people want to be

So much this. Australia has ridiculous space compared to population. In comparison to somewhere like Singapore, we have sooo much space.

And yet bureaucracy seems to be trying to kill off most places not a capital city...

[JumpCrisscross]

> One thing that can’t be scaled is “prime location”

Literally density.

[pessimizer]

Density trashes a location.

[dqv]

I LOVE density. I still live in the same place I grew up and they are "trashing" our location. I know this because that's what all the people age 50+ who live here are saying (it's actually just a subset of the 50+ people, but mostly in that demographic). Takes forever to take a left turn now and they HATE it. They hate sitting there waiting for 4 lanes (2 lanes in both directions) of traffic to clear so they can speed off to work out of the Bojangles parking lot.

Growing up here, I hated how walking places took a whole hour to go anywhere fun, had to walk on medians on a highway to get to the movie theater.

We finally have enough demand due to increased density that they're building out a bus stop within walking distance. I already can walk or bike to get groceries and the pedestrian infrastructure is good enough that I can walk to a few different places, adding the bus route gets me to the train station and even the airport. I experienced the tyranny of the car, first in my childhood, without a car, now in my adulthood, with a car, but soon a closer step free of that tyranny with increases in these kinds of transit services.

Not that I don't think the urbanization is perfect. One of the bigger ones I've noticed is everyone has sterile landscaping, dead grass lawns (even when not in a drought) and other stuff that provides little wildlife value. At least we have serviceberry trees in our neighborhood...

Thing is, even in rural areas, the landscaping will be messed up or sterile too. I even saw someone with a HUGE thicket of bamboo, easily a quarter acre, maybe more, I could only see it from the road. Now that trashes a location!! Not moving anywhere close to that! Yet, the rural life affords more space for less money, which allows, in the correct non-trashed location, the ability to create a valuable space for wildlife.

I find it a really hard choice to make. I'd have to live in a smaller house in a rural area accounting for the fact that I would absolutely go the cheapest I could get, down to a single wide. And giving up the nice infrastructure! I mean, I don't think density is perfect, there are tradeoffs, but I do find the version that I'm experiencing to be enjoyable. I think the only thing that would make it unbearable is if they started rolling back the transit/pedestrian/bike infrastructure progress we've made.

I do think there's an argument against over development, but that's still a "building up" problem. Build up tall, but with bigger green space - like 2-3 acres at least.

[JumpCrisscross]

This attitude is anathema to affordable housing. One fundamentally cannot get it where people want it without density.

[nradov]

Really? Some of the least dense areas are also among the most affordable.

[JumpCrisscross]

> Some of the least dense areas are also among the most affordable

Taking into account job opportunities and cost of goods, it’s often a wash or worse, particularly if you consider standard of living.

[wombatpm]

And the RTO fad means those Low Cost areas continue to decline.

[nradov]

Really? Cities like Cleveland, Memphis, or Wichita aren't particularly dense but they're affordable in terms of median price-to-income ratio. The unemployment rate in Cleveland is only 4% so there would seem to be job opportunities.

[lesuorac]

It can though.

The USG kinda used to do this by changing the headquarters for an agency/organization to be in the western (less populated) states.

[nonethewiser]

That's not exactly true. Its possible to bootstrap entire cities successfully. Look at China. In the US, redeveloping Gary Indiana would be a good option for this sort of thing.

And I guess some billionaires are trying to do something more greenfield in Solano County, California.

"Prime location" is not some static thing.

[wanoir]

Building from scratch is much easier / when you can demolish everything that pre-exists.

I don’t think this is realistic in already-developed areas where home values may already be very high.

Not aware of the Gary story! Would be curious to see how that’s going and if there’s local support / resistance.

[nonethewiser]

There is no large effort in Gary. There is a growing case for a 3rd Chicago airport and proximity to Chicago, low cost of real estate, and being in Indiana instead of Illinois makes it attractive for other projects, but there is no holistic effort to redevelop it into a new city. That's just a location I'm identifying as a prime location.

Totally greenfield is easier for some things and less easy for others. Would be interesting to try and spin something up in Wyoming based off the pro-business culture but it would take huge amounts of migration. Would be cool to see and not impossible but less analogous to success stories in China, which was my point of comparison.

[NoGravitas]

Public transit is one thing that could help. Another is a land value tax, which would incentivize density in places with rising demand.