Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Opening space at the high end of a market can have a disproportionate effect on a total market by removing massive amounts of bidding power. Are there studies on this bit playing out in practice? My impression so far, mostly looking at Manhattan redevelopment, is that building high-end condos typically does not reduce prices for other buildings in the area, but rather raises them: the presence of new high-end housi…
> But probably not good if you want to lower the prices. The thing I'm thinking of is the city-wide market, rather than in a particular locale. One way or the other, though, the wealthy will get to live where they want. The best thing you can do is to try and save the furniture by putting them into golden ghettos, rather than having them fan out and drive off people in multiple districts. > Good statistics either way…
Some people hope to make the city stay unattractive to rich people, so they prefer to live on the Peninsula or North Bay (or in NYC, maybe some nice condo towers on Jersey's "gold coast"). So you still have the golden ghetto, so to speak, but you try to put it elsewhere. Even leaving aside whether that's a good goal, I think it's certainly a good question whether current policy will actually do that; it's quite possible anti-growth policies won't have that effect anyway (e.g. Paris's anti-growth policy has certainly not resulted in a non-gentrified Paris). The interconnections are pretty interesting though, and seem hard to model, especially with the existing data points (e.g. NYC) having, as you point out, their own oddities.