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Change my mind: Density increases local but decreases global prices

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Re: Change my mind: Density increases local but decreases global prices

#101

Post by piva00 »

rippercushions wrote: post #86
chii wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you got it the wrong way around - cities _form_ around opportunities, rather than produce them. Initially, geographic advantage (such as being near harbour, river, or some other geographic feature) gives a settlement that's not yet a city a big advantage in attracting more people there. This in turn, forces the city to grow as more people cram in. To artificially build denser by policy doesn't produce opportu…

There are lots of planned cities that are natural experiments in this: Brasilia, Canberra, Ottawa, Abuja etc. They all show that yes, it is possible to "build it and they will come", but it's hugely expensive, takes a long, long time (decades) to get to critical mass, and produced mixed results at best, eg Brasilia's original strictly separated zoning has been widely panned as a disaster. And I'm pretty sure all of t…

Brasilia was not originally planned to have separate zoning, Lucio Costas's vision (Lucio Costa was one of the architects together with Niemeyer to design the city) was one of "superblocks", a block was supposed to be close to self-sufficiency (hence the enormous block sizes), each was to have housing, shops, schools and so on in the block or in neighbouring blocks. The military dictatorship of Brazil decided to revamp the plan and deploy stricter zoning, separating shops from residential areas which made the city a urban hell of traffic and commute.

Brasilia is also what I would call "not a city", it has a pretty large population which doesn't live in it like in a city. There's very few vibrant public places there, from an urbanist perspective it's a complete disaster.

Re: Change my mind: Density increases local but decreases global prices

#103

Post by lazyasciiart »

nullc wrote: post #29

Why is it that many of the same people who argue against more roads and more parking lots on the basis of induced demand preventing more roads from meaningfully solving congestion seem to think that in the densest and most competitive cities that adding units will necessarily make hosing affordable?

Because it's easier for people to change their commute than it is to move to another city.

Re: Change my mind: Density increases local but decreases global prices

#104

Post by somenameforme »

joshlemer wrote: post #85
somenameforme wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People generally don't seem to be aware of Japan's economic state. Here are some relevant data: Graph of Japanese Stock Market: https://www.macrotrends.net/2593/nikkei-225-index-historical... Graph of Japan's Population: https://tradingeconomics.com/japan/population Graph of Tokyo's Population: https://www.macrotrends.net/cities/21671/tokyo/population Average Salary in Tokyo: https://www.timedoctor.com/blog/average-s…

I personally don't think it's such a bad thing if our population stays stable rather than increasing, even small decline I don't think is such a bad thing.

It's not going to be a small decline. Here [1] is a population projection for Japan based on UN numbers. And those numbers are unreasonably optimistic, because they make the assumption that life expectancy in the future will continue to increase at the rate it has in the past, and that Japan's fertility rate will substantially increase in the future. Neither assumption seems justified.

The important issue is that fertility is an exponential function. When one group has a low fertility rate they have fewer children, and those children have fewer children so onward. And so the rate of decline never changes unless the fertility rate does. But these numbers are also staggered out by the life expectancy of the first generation to have lower fertility.

So when going from high to low fertility society you will see a period of increase, stabilization, and then exponential decline. With Japan we're just about to head into the exponential decline phase. I expect the reason the UN expects a fertility rate change is that if you don't increase it, you go extinct. So it'll probably become the next big issue relatively soon - across the entire developed world.

---------

Also in terms of things like an 'aging population.' This does not change when the older group dies off. In fact if the aging population had a higher fertility rate than their children, then it will only become worse. It's the exact same issue in play. When you have lots of children, you end up with a high youth to elderly population. When you don't have many children, you end up with a high elderly to youth population. And that poses immense practical, social, and economic problems.

[1] - https://population.un.org/wpp/Graphs/Probabilistic/POP/TOT/3...

Re: Change my mind: Density increases local but decreases global prices

#105

Post by noduerme »

rippercushions wrote: post #86
chii wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you got it the wrong way around - cities _form_ around opportunities, rather than produce them. Initially, geographic advantage (such as being near harbour, river, or some other geographic feature) gives a settlement that's not yet a city a big advantage in attracting more people there. This in turn, forces the city to grow as more people cram in. To artificially build denser by policy doesn't produce opportu…

There are lots of planned cities that are natural experiments in this: Brasilia, Canberra, Ottawa, Abuja etc. They all show that yes, it is possible to "build it and they will come", but it's hugely expensive, takes a long, long time (decades) to get to critical mass, and produced mixed results at best, eg Brasilia's original strictly separated zoning has been widely panned as a disaster. And I'm pretty sure all of t…

>> if the capital was ever moved out

I initially read this as meaning "if the money was ever moved out", and then laughed ... yes, if they ever stopped being the capital ...

Re: Change my mind: Density increases local but decreases global prices

#106

Post by quickthrower2 »

engineer_22 wrote: post #33
hnboredhn wrote: post #18

Isn't the obvious arrow here that high prices drives density? The fact that NYC is the densest and most expensive seems to be an obvious story of high prices incentivizing people to build up. The question is whether or not an old building being replaced by a tower or a single family house will lead to more expensive housing throughout the city. I still am confused as to how density would hurt locally here.

I hadn't thought of it like this before, but I think he's arguing that there is a network effect. High density is more convenient, which induces demand.

It is harder for us tech workers to fathom, as we work for the global market directly or indirectly, the but a lot of people working in a city are directly serving other people in that city. A person coming in might create more than a jobs worth of “CityGDP” by their simple economic activity.

Re: Change my mind: Density increases local but decreases global prices

#108

Post by MrMan »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #106
engineer_22 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hadn't thought of it like this before, but I think he's arguing that there is a network effect. High density is more convenient, which induces demand.

It is harder for us tech workers to fathom, as we work for the global market directly or indirectly, the but a lot of people working in a city are directly serving other people in that city. A person coming in might create more than a jobs worth of “CityGDP” by their simple economic activity.

[dead]

Re: Change my mind: Density increases local but decreases global prices

#109

Post by amadeuspagel »

antognini wrote: post #75

I feel like this (along with many discussions about urban housing) slightly misses the real issue. A lot of these discussions center around how to make housing affordable in cities and whether denser construction leads to lower housing costs or higher housing costs. But cities don't exist to minimize housing costs. They exist to maximize opportunities: job opportunities, dating opportunities, friendship opportunities…

> If you build more housing in a city, more people move there, and the city becomes more desirable as a result, is the city better or worse off for having built the housing?

Is the existing population of the city better or worse off? That's the question that matters politically, since only the existing population gets to vote in city elections.

Re: Change my mind: Density increases local but decreases global prices

#110

Post by presentation »

Tokyo built tons of housing (and transportation to that housing) and while price per square foot is high, actually living centrally is not very expensive.

It probably goes up at first, then comes down once you’ve hit some level of density relative to demand.

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