Change my mind: Density increases local but decreases global prices • Hacker News Board

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

#161

Post by autoexec » Wed, May 03, 2023, 2:36 AM UTC

TheCoelacanth wrote: post #160

autoexec wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The greater the number of people in a given area the worse it will be for that environment. Honestly, I even think detached houses beat most apartments. Apartments often depend on electric baseboard radiators and window AC units for heating and cooling. They often have multiple massive hot water heaters where the people on higher floors must leave their water running for 10-15 minutes before they start getting hot wa…

That's nonsense. You don't get less environmental impact by having every person take up more land. Urban living is much more environmentally friendly because the alternative is paving over more of the environment. The incentive to make improvements comes from ownership model, not form factor. Apartments can be owned and houses can be rented.

> You don't get less environmental impact by having every person take up more land. Urban living is much more environmentally friendly because the alternative is paving over more of the environment.

It's not about how much land a person uses, it's how that land is being used. Nobody sitting on a 5 or 6 acre lot in the middle of hickville is going to build one house and pave the rest with asphalt. Urban living is "paving over more of the environment" and you can see that with just minutes spent with Google maps looking at satellite views of urban vs rural areas. Rural areas are filled with grasslands and trees (and farms) while urban areas are vast expanses of concrete and asphalt with tiny islands of grass and trees.

People in rural areas take up more land while at the same time using (and abusing) far less of it. Having largely unspoiled nature around you is a big part of the appeal to rural living, or so I'm told, I actually prefer living in cities.

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

#162

Post by midoridensha » Wed, May 03, 2023, 2:48 AM UTC

noduerme wrote: post #105

rippercushions wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ...

"Capital" is a weird word in English. It can mean money as you refer to, but it can also refer to the city where a country's seat of government lies. Then there's "capitol" (with an 'o'), which refers to a building in the capital city where the legislative body meets.

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

#163

Post by midoridensha » Wed, May 03, 2023, 2:52 AM UTC

AeiumNE wrote: post #148

midoridensha wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Washington DC, for instance, is an artificial city with top-down planning, but it was built at a time when people had different ideas about what made a great city, and it doesn't really seem to be a failure. As I recall, DC was designed by George Washington himself (probably with help from his friends), back in the late 1700s, but the city as a whole was not: what they designed was the Federal district only. The Cap…

What is your source here? I am from DC and it's pretty well known that it is a planned city. Look up the L'Enfant Plan. I'm not really sure what you are talking about.

Go look at the map of the L'Enfant Plan. Now compare it to a map of modern-day DC. They aren't the same: the modern city is much larger. The original plan just covers the federal district, street layouts, etc. Georgetown is just a name on the side of the plan, for instance, with no actual plan. The original plan certainly doesn't include the subway system, or Union station and all the train lines, or many many other things.

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

#164

Post by TheCoelacanth » Wed, May 03, 2023, 3:47 AM UTC

autoexec wrote: post #161

TheCoelacanth wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's nonsense. You don't get less environmental impact by having every person take up more land. Urban living is much more environmentally friendly because the alternative is paving over more of the environment. The incentive to make improvements comes from ownership model, not form factor. Apartments can be owned and houses can be rented.

> You don't get less environmental impact by having every person take up more land. Urban living is much more environmentally friendly because the alternative is paving over more of the environment. It's not about how much land a person uses, it's how that land is being used. Nobody sitting on a 5 or 6 acre lot in the middle of hickville is going to build one house and pave the rest with asphalt. Urban living is "pav…

I'm not debating that one acre of urban land is worse for the environment than one acre of rural land, but that's not a realistic tradeoff. You need hundreds or thousands of times as much land to house people in a rural setting than in an urban setting.

Rural people don't pave over all of the land that they have, but they certainly pave over more of it than each person's share of paved over land in an urban setting.

If all the people in the entirety of Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, and the western half of Minnesota lived at the density of NYC, more than half a million square miles or more than 99.9% of the entire land area in those states would be completely untouched wilderness[1]. If you think that all human habitation in Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, and the western half of Minnesota combined has a smaller impact on the environment than 469 square miles of NYC, then you are clearly delusional.

[1] https://www.slate.com/articles/life/culturebox/2014/10/popul...

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

#165

Post by nullc » Wed, May 03, 2023, 4:18 AM UTC

scythe wrote: post #72

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?

>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 Well, partially because induced demand is a little bit of a meme, and partially because it's actually different. See, if you have a city that's dense enough that transit actually represents a high share of trips, it's possible that increas…

Thanks for the Braess paradox link.

I think you could potentially generalize the Braess paradox to talk about where people live.

The intuition is that we'd be best off if the distribution of demand matched supply, then housing costs from town to town would be identically distributed and all markets would be well utilized and none over-congested. But many people selfishly prefer to live in dense areas because network effects make it more valuable to live in those places, more choice in jobs, more people to interact with, etc.

Not only does this cause under-utilization in less desirable locations, it huts affordability-- which people consider a terminal value ('cause housing is necessary for life) independent of the overall utility or efficiency. Though we're OKAY with certain houses or even neighborhoods being out of reach of some, we consider it a problem when whole cities or regions are broadly unaffordable.

[It's not clear to me that we should, any more than we consider it a problem that not everyone can afford to live in SwankyHeights. But it's a complicated situation, since there is a reason people want to live in dense areas, like wanting access to jobs or services, making "so go live elsewhere" not a great answer.]

Okay, so we add housing. Now the incentives change around in terms of who wants to live where, and there isn't a particular guarantee that the equilibrium prices that result will be lower-- they could well be higher because we just shifted the balance to attract more people from elsewhere.

It's a handwave, but over the time span of years, I'd argue that demand for dense cities is more like your transit-to-driving example than your "everyone-is-in-cars" example. People outside of the dense areas are "taking transit", but if you changed the economics they'd prefer to take a car.

> More trips usually mean that you actually improved people's lives, which is a good thing.

Right but that also assumes overall improvement is the thing people care about.

So in a hypothetical where increasing the number of units in a city made every unit more valuable and so made the city less affordable, it would still create an aggregate improvement in utility and so it arguably should be done. But the issue being complaint about wasn't cities doing the most good possible, it was about cities being affordable to the most people.

Kind of like complaining about roads because they take up space that could benefit mankind in other ways, vs complaining about roads because they facilitate cars.

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

#166

Post by nullc » Wed, May 03, 2023, 5:21 AM UTC

ethanbond wrote: post #131

renewiltord wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is an American characteristic. Many more things are possible in this world than are possible in America but to Americans they seem like immutable characteristics rather than the result of choices. Mostly, it is regulation. Example of something is the two staircase rule for buildings.

Mostly it is zoning which is largely pushed by NIMBYs who are trying to protect their real estate investments.

There is a LOT more than zoning that goes into the cost of construction driven by regulations. I wouldn't be particularly surprised if you could only attribute a single digit percentage of the all in cost to zoning for construction in the bay area.

Here is how you could do a first order approximation: Find property zoned so you could build dense housing and get its cost minus the cost of the improvements. Then find matched property zoned for a single family homes, minus their improvements. The difference is attributable to zoning for the purpose of this approximation. What percent of that is that in the overall cost of the multi-unit construction?

I'm not sure of the figure but given that the entire land cost isn't that big a percentage in dense construction, I expect the impact from zoning to be fairly small but not negligible.

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

#167

Post by konschubert » Wed, May 03, 2023, 7:39 AM UTC

autoexec wrote: post #161

TheCoelacanth wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's nonsense. You don't get less environmental impact by having every person take up more land. Urban living is much more environmentally friendly because the alternative is paving over more of the environment. The incentive to make improvements comes from ownership model, not form factor. Apartments can be owned and houses can be rented.

> You don't get less environmental impact by having every person take up more land. Urban living is much more environmentally friendly because the alternative is paving over more of the environment. It's not about how much land a person uses, it's how that land is being used. Nobody sitting on a 5 or 6 acre lot in the middle of hickville is going to build one house and pave the rest with asphalt. Urban living is "pav…

I guess the misunderstanding comes from the fact that you consider a garden "environment/nature".

And the parent commenter does not consider a garden "environment/nature".

Nature in general is important because it creates biodiversity and space to roam. Forests in particular are sequestering CO2 and are producing oxygen.

The average garden behind a detached house does approximately none of that.

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

#168

Post by konschubert » Wed, May 03, 2023, 7:46 AM UTC

colmmacc wrote: post #54

Never mind houses, what about gas/petrol? It always seems to be more expensive in dense cities, even though there is greater competition and economies of scale (e.g. delivery of the fuel to the stations) while it tends to be cheaper in rural middle-of-nowheres, even if there is no immediate local competition. The cost of land and labor is higher, sure, but even the stations that are owned rather than rented don't see…

If these petrol stations weren't earning so much, they would close and sell the lot for re-development.

Which is what happened many times ... which is why the remaining ones can charge a bit more.

A petrol station is not a charity...

That being said, I agree that it seems unfair that people can just own a piece of land for generations and keep profiting off it. Which is true for real estate as well.

A land value tax might help resolve this unfairness.

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

#169

Post by ethanbond » Wed, May 03, 2023, 10:52 AM UTC

nullc wrote: post #166

ethanbond wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mostly it is zoning which is largely pushed by NIMBYs who are trying to protect their real estate investments.

There is a LOT more than zoning that goes into the cost of construction driven by regulations. I wouldn't be particularly surprised if you could only attribute a single digit percentage of the all in cost to zoning for construction in the bay area. Here is how you could do a first order approximation: Find property zoned so you could build dense housing and get its cost minus the cost of the improvements. Then find m…

Why would that tell you what zoning is doing? Restrictive zoning raises the costs of all land.

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

#170

Post by autoexec » Wed, May 03, 2023, 11:10 AM UTC

TheCoelacanth wrote: post #164

autoexec wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You don't get less environmental impact by having every person take up more land. Urban living is much more environmentally friendly because the alternative is paving over more of the environment. It's not about how much land a person uses, it's how that land is being used. Nobody sitting on a 5 or 6 acre lot in the middle of hickville is going to build one house and pave the rest with asphalt. Urban living is "pav…

I'm not debating that one acre of urban land is worse for the environment than one acre of rural land, but that's not a realistic tradeoff. You need hundreds or thousands of times as much land to house people in a rural setting than in an urban setting. Rural people don't pave over all of the land that they have, but they certainly pave over more of it than each person's share of paved over land in an urban setting.…

It's true that if all the people in Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, and the western half of Minnesota were packed into a tiny space with the density of NYC all of the land they abandoned would be better off, but the land they were shoved into would be much much worse off for it.

Like I said: the greater the number of people in a given area the worse it will be for that environment.

We need to find a better balance between stacking people on top of each other and destroying the ecosystem in the places where we live without any thought to biocapacity or local wildlife, and spreading out so far that it's impractical and inefficient to deliver or provide the goods and services humans want.

Since every human takes a massive toll on the local ecosystem, spreading that impact out more than we do in highly packed cities would be better for the environment and also better for humans who also suffer under those types of conditions. As I said, I don't think I've seen that balance hit quite right just yet, but it's something we're going to have to start thinking about more carefully as resources like drinkable water grow scarce, climate refugees from around the world are taken in, people along the costs are forced inland or to higher ground, and much of the western US succumbs to desertification and high temperatures that threaten to make large population centers unsustainable.

The US is likely going to get a lot more crowed in the future. We'll need to find a better way than absolutely trashing the land we settle on and suffering all the effects that go with that.